Period tripling in the bilinear-biquadratic antiferromagnetic<i>S</i>=1 chain

Abstract

We study numerically the elementary excitation spectrum of the most general isotropic spin-1 chain with bilinear-biquadratic nearest-neighbor coupling. Using finite-size scaling, a massless phase with a period tripling in the ground state is found to exist in an extended region around the Lai-Sutherland point. The location of the transition from the known valence-bond-like phase to the trimerized phase cannot, however, be given precisely. We also present results on the ground-state two-point correlation function.