Dynamic structure factor of the spin-1/2 XXZ chain in a transverse field

Abstract

The spin-$\frac{1}{2}$ XXZ chain with easy-plane anisotropy in a transverse field describes well the thermodynamic properties of the material $\mathrm{C}{\mathrm{s}}_2\mathrm{CoC}{\mathrm{l}}_4$ in a wide range of temperatures and fields including the region close to the spin-flop Ising quantum phase transition. For a comparison with prospective inelastic neutron scattering experiments on this compound, we present results of an extensive numerical study of its dynamic structure factor ${\mathcal{S}}^{\alpha \beta }(k,\omega )$ using matrix-product-state (MPS) techniques. Close to criticality, the dynamic part of the correlator ${\mathcal{S}}^{xx}$ longitudinal to the applied field is incoherent and possesses a small total weight as the ground state is already close to saturation. The transverse correlator ${\mathcal{S}}^{zz}$, on the other hand, is dominated by a coherent single-particle excitation with additional spectral weight at higher energies that we tentatively attribute to a repulsively bound pair of particles. With increasing temperature, the latter quickly fades and spectral weight instead accumulates close to zero wavevector just above the single-particle energy. On a technical level, we compare the numerical efficiency of real-time evolution to an MPS-based Chebyshev expansion in the present context, finding that both methods yield results of similar quality at comparable numerical costs.

11 pages, 7 figures, published version