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Abstract:
Ferromagnetic, in contrast to antiferromagnetic, Heisenberg chains can undergo a spin-Peierls dimerization only at finite temperatures. They show reentrant behavior as a function of temperature, which might play a role for systems with small effective elastic constants as, for example, monatomic chains on surfaces. We investigate the physical properties of the dimerized ferromagnetic Heisenberg chain using a modified spin-wave theory. We calculate the exponentially decaying spin-and dimer-correlation functions, analyze the temperature dependence of the corresponding coherence lengths, the susceptibility, as well as the static and dynamic spin-structure factors. By comparing with numerical data obtained by the density-matrix renormalization group applied to transfer matrices, we find that the modified spin-wave theory yields excellent results for all these quantities for a wide range of dimerizations and temperatures.
