Novel elementary excitations in spin-1/2 antiferromagnets on the triangular lattice

TL;DR

This paper introduces novel high-energy elementary excitations in spin-1/2 antiferromagnets on a triangular lattice using an advanced bond-operator technique, explaining experimental anomalies in spin dynamics.

Contribution

It presents a new application of the bond-operator technique that reveals previously unknown high-energy excitations and explains experimental observations beyond spin-wave theory.

Findings

Discovery of high-energy collective excitations in the model

Identification of a novel high-energy quasiparticle

Explanation of anomalous spin dynamics observed experimentally

Abstract

We discuss spin-$\frac12$ Heisenberg antiferromagnet on the triangular lattice using the recently proposed bond-operator technique (BOT). We use the variant of the BOT which takes into account all spin degrees of freedom in the magnetic unit cell containing three spins. Apart from conventional magnons known from the spin-wave theory (SWT), there are novel high-energy collective excitations in the BOT which are built from high-energy excitations of the magnetic unit cell. We obtain also another novel high-energy quasiparticle which has no counterpart not only in the SWT but also in the harmonic approximation of the BOT. All observed elementary excitations produce visible anomalies in dynamical spin correlators. We show that quantum fluctuations considerably change properties of conventional magnons predicted by the SWT. The effect of a small easy-plane anisotropy is discussed. The anomalous spin dynamics with multiple peaks in the dynamical structure factor is explained that was observed recently experimentally in $\rm Ba_3CoSb_2O_9$ and which the SWT could not describe even qualitatively.