Lineshape of the singlet-triplet excitations in the dimer system Sr 3 Cr 2 O 8 to first order in the high-density 1/z expansion

The Cr 5+ ions in Sr 3 Cr 2 O 8 constitute a strongly correlated spin-1/2 dimer system. Experiments show that the collective singlet-triplet excitations in this system are well defined in the zero-temperature limit, but, when heated, the inelastic neutron scattering peaks decrease rapidly in intensity and acquire a nonzero line width. When including the fluctuations to leading order in 1/z , where z is the coordination number, the diagrammatic high-density expansion is found to offer an accurate description of the singlet-triplet excitations. The theory explains not only the temperature dependencies of the intensities and line widths, but also that strong correlation causes the lineshapes to become asymmetric at temperatures comparable to the excitation energies.© 2014, American Physical Society