Low-temperature dynamics of magnons in a spin-1/2 ladder compound

Phys Rev Lett. 2011 Apr 29;106(17):177202. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.106.177202. Epub 2011 Apr 25.

Abstract

We have used a combination of neutron resonant spin-echo and triple-axis spectroscopies to determine the energy, fine structure, and linewidth of the magnon resonance in the model spin-1/2 ladder antiferromagnet IPA-CuCl(3) at temperatures T≪Δ(0)/k(B), where Δ(0) is the spin gap at T=0. In this low-temperature regime we find that the results deviate substantially from the predictions of the nonlinear sigma model proposed as a description of magnon excitations in one-dimensional quantum magnets and attribute these deviations to real-space and spin-space anisotropies in the spin Hamiltonian as well as scattering of magnon excitations from a dilute density of impurities. These effects are generic to experimental realizations of one-dimensional quantum magnets.