Quantum Critical Dynamics of a Heisenberg-Ising Chain in a Longitudinal Field: Many-Body Strings versus Fractional Excitations

Phys Rev Lett. 2019 Aug 9;123(6):067202. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.123.067202.

Abstract

We report a high-resolution terahertz spectroscopic study of quantum spin dynamics in the antiferromagnetic Heisenberg-Ising spin-chain compound BaCo_{2}V_{2}O_{8} as a function of temperature and longitudinal magnetic field. Confined spinon excitations are observed in an antiferromagnetic phase below T_{N}≃5.5 K. In a field-induced gapless phase above B_{c}=3.8 T, we identify many-body string excitations as well as low-energy fractional psinon or antipsinon excitations by comparing to Bethe ansatz calculations. In the vicinity of B_{c}, the high-energy string excitations are found to have a dominant contribution to the spin dynamics as compared with the fractional excitations.