Seminarium Fizyki Materii Skondensowanej

In this study, we provide an intuitive understanding of the collective low-energy spin excitation of the one-dimensional spin-1/2 antiferromagnetic Heisenberg chain, known as the spinon. We demonstrate that a single spinon can be excited by adding one extra spin to the ground state wave function of the Heisenberg chain with an even number of sites. This procedure accurately reproduces all key features of the spinon's dispersion, and provides a natural explanation for its spin-1/2. We also show that the spinon dispersion can be approximately reproduced if we replace the true ground state with the simplest valence-bond solid. This proves that the spinon of the one-dimensional Heisenberg model can be understood as a single spin flowing through a valence-bond solid.