Multimagnon dynamics and thermalization in the <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"><mml:mrow><mml:mi>S</mml:mi><mml:mo>=</mml:mo><mml:mn>1</mml:mn></mml:mrow></mml:math> easy-axis ferromagnetic chain
P. A. Sharma, Kyungmin Lee, Hitesh J. Changlani
Abstract
Quasiparticles are physically motivated mathematical constructs for simplifying the seemingly complicated many-body description of solids. A complete understanding of their dynamics and the nature of the effective interactions between them provides rich information on real material properties at the microscopic level. In this paper, we explore the dynamics and interactions of magnon quasiparticles in a ferromagnetic spin-1 Heisenberg chain with easy-axis on-site anisotropy, a model relevant for the explanation of recent terahertz optics experiments on ${\mathrm{NiNb}}_{2}{\mathrm{O}}_{6}$ [P. Chauhan et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 124, 037203 (2020)], and nonequilibrium dynamics in ultracold-atomic settings [W. C. Chung et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 126, 163203 (2021)]. We build a picture for the properties of clouds of a few magnons with the help of exact diagonalization and density matrix renormalization group calculations supported by physically motivated Jastrow wave functions. We show how the binding energy of magnons effectively reduces with their number and explain how this energy scale is of direct relevance for dynamical magnetic susceptibility measurements. This understanding is used to make predictions for ultracold-atomic platforms, which are ideally suited to study the thermalization of multimagnon states. We simulate the nonequilibrium dynamics of these chains using the matrix product state based time-evolution block decimation algorithm and explore the dependence of revivals and thermalization on magnon density and easy-axis on-site anisotropy (which controls the strength of effective magnon interactions). We observe behaviors akin to those reported for many-body quantum scars, which we explain with an analytic approximation that is accurate in the limit of small anisotropy.