Magnon decay in gapped quantum spin systems

Abstract

In the O(3) sigma-model description of gapped spin systems, S=1 magnons can only decay into three lower energy magnons. We argue that the symmetry of the quantum spin Hamiltonian often allows decay into two magnons, and compute this decay rate in model systems. Two magnon decay is present in Haldane gap S=1 spin chains, even though it cannot be induced by any allowed term written in powers and gradients of the sigma-model field. We compare our results with recent measurements of Stone et al. (cond-mat/0511266) on a two-dimensional spin system.

4 pages, 3 figures

References in corpus (2)

• Dynamics of composite Haldane spin chains in IPA-CuCl3
• On the mass spectrum of the two-dimensional O(3) sigma model with theta term

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