Numerical solution of larges=1/2 ands=1 Heisenberg antiferromagnetic spin chains using a truncated basis expansion

A new method of determining the spectra of simple quantum-mechanical spin Hamiltonians by direct Hamiltonian-matrix diagonalization is presented. The method is illustrated by applying it to the isotropic one-dimensional Heisenberg antiferromagnet, for which calculations were performed for longer spin chains than by previous direct Hamiltonian-matrix diagonalizations. For spin s=1/2 it was possible to accurately determine the ground- and first-excited-state energies for chains of length N=32 and 64. For s=1 the longest chain for which a similar computation was performed was N=32; the singlet-triplet Haldane gap is found to be 0.421±{}0.005 which is consistent with earlier Monte Carlo results. Long-spin-chain calculations are performed iteratively by solving smaller-chain problems, and constructing from their eigenvalues, and eigenstates, the longer-spin-chain basis and Hamiltonian matrices. The computations were performed on a small computer, which suggests that much larger problems could be handled with a parallel-processing supercomputer.