300 Ch.

6 Heisenberg Magnets

twofold degeneracy arises from the symmetry-breaking two-sublattice

N6el state. Furthermore, (6.110) holds in the entire Brillouin zone (be-
cause translational symmetry has not been broken), while (6.109) would
hold only in the reduced zone (because of magnetic cell-doubling). Such
qualifying statements notwithstanding, the similarity of the two formu-
lae is striking and one may ask if there is something common in the
physical mechanisms leading to them. We cite the finding [250] that
the asymptotic behaviour of the T = 0 spin-spin correlation function
is23
(6.111)
where we set the lattice constant a = 1. If a spin looks around to see
if its fellows line up with it, it may say that on its sublattice they tend
to be parallel, while on the alternate sublattice antiparallel, only this
order will eventually decay in the far distance. The situation is often de-
scribed as quasi-long-range order, emphasizing that correlations decay
very slowly (algebraically rather than exponentially). We may envisage
that an excitation propagating down the lattice sees enough of alternat-
ing order to behave as if it were in a long-range-ordered system, and
develops a gapless spectrum. The w + 0 excitation is not a Goldstone
mode but it is something similar.
The 1 / decay
~ law shown in (6.111) has an immediate corollary.
Since according to linear response theory, the static susceptibility is
related to intersite correlations via

(6.112)

the staggered susceptibility of the linear chain diverges like the harmonic
series

We may say that the ground state is fluctuating so wildly because T = 0

is the critical temperature of the system. The divergent response to a
23An accurate expression, including a multiplicative logarithmic correction, has
been derived for S = 1/2 [8].