Intermediate-statistics Spin Waves ——————————————————

In this paper, we show that spin waves, the elementary excitation of the Heisenberg magnetic system, obey a kind of intermediate statistics with a finite maximum occupation number n. We construct an operator realization for the intermediate statistics obeyed by magnons, the quantized spin waves, and then construct a corresponding intermediate-statistics realization for the angular momentum algebra in terms of the creation and annihilation operators of the magnons. In other words, instead of the Holstein-Primakoff representation, a bosonic representation subject to a constraint on the occupation number, we present an intermediate-statistics representation with no constraints. In this realization, the maximum occupation number is naturally embodied in the commutation relation of creation and annihilation operators, while the Holstein-Primakoff representation is a bosonic operator relation with an additional putting-in-by-hand restriction on the occupation number. We deduce the intermediate-statistics distribution function for magnons from the intermediate-statistics commutation relation of the creation and annihilation operators directly, which is a modified Bose-Einstein distribution. Based on these results, we calculate the dispersion relations for ferromagnetic and antiferromag-netic spin waves. The relations between the intermediate statistics that magnons obey and the other two important kinds of intermediate statistics, Haldane-Wu statistics and the fractional statistics of anyons, are discussed. We also compare the spectrum of the intermediate-statistics spin wave with the exact solution of the one-dimensional s = 1/2 Heisenberg model, which is obtained by the Bethe ansatz method. For ferromagnets, we take the contributions from the interaction between magnons (the quartic contribution), the next-to-nearest-neighbor interaction, and the dipolar interaction into account for comparison with the experiment.