Ground state of a spin-phonon system. III. Small-B limit

Abstract

The ground state of the spin-one-half acoustic phonon system is studied in the limitB≪1. The technique is to combine the Brillouin-Wigner variational perturbation theory with a source canonical transformation. With theB=0 source transform the energy is calculated as a function of coupling constant through terms of orderB ². To this order there is no phase transition. The theory gives the crossover from perturbation theory to an improved classical theory with quantum fluctuations. With a source transform with a nonzero inverse lengthβ the energy estimate is further improved to next order in the coupling constant and for larger values ofB. The soft, infinite-order transition of the modified source theory is removed in the limitB≪1.