One- and two-magnon excitations in a one-dimensional antiferromagnet in a magnetic field
- 1 October 1981
- journal article
- research article
- Published by American Physical Society (APS) in Physical Review B
- Vol. 24 (7), 3939-3953
- https://doi.org/10.1103/physrevb.24.3939
Abstract
We have carried out a comprehensive experimental and theoretical study of the inelastic scattering in the one-dimensional near-Heisenberg antiferromagnet NMn (TMMC) at low temperatures, K, in magnetic fields varying between 0 and 70 kOe; the field is applied perpendicular to the chain axis. In zero field at long wavelengths we observe two sets of excitations, a low-energy acoustic branch corresponding to spin motion within the dipolar-determined easy plane and a high-energy optical branch corresponding to oscillations out of the plane. For magnetic fields greater than 30 kOe and K we observe as many as four distinct excitations—the two one-magnon modes plus two sharp excitations at higher energies. Our theroretical analysis suggests that the two higher-energy modes correspond to two-magnon processes in the longitudinal response function. The theory, which is done within the harmonic approximation expanding out to fourth order in the magnon operators, gives a good qualitative description of the data but underestimates the two-magnon intensities by a factor of 2 or 3. We also observe a marked anticrossing of the one- and two-magnon branches; this latter result shows that anharmonic effects are quite important in the spin dynamics. Finally at K and zero field we observe a gap of 0.1 meV in the acoustic spin-wave dispersion relation due to a very small in-plane anisotropy field of 71 ± 30 Oe.
Keywords
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