REAL-SPACE RENORMALIZATION-GROUP STUDIES OF LOW-DIMENSIONAL QUANTUM ANTIFERROMAGNETS

We study the ground state of one- and two-dimensional (square-lattice) spin-1/2 quantum antiferromagnets using a numerical real-space renormalization-group (RG) approach. In our RG approach we consider blocks of various sizes but with an odd number of sites; we retain only the doublet ground state and we integrate out the higher-energy states by means of second-order quasidegenerate perturbation theory. That is, we assume that the role of the excited states of a block, in the RG iteration process, is to renormalize the effective coupling parameters between blocks. We compute the ground-state energy of a spin-1/2 linear chain for various block sizes and find close agreement with the Bethe-ansatz exact solution. In the case of the spin-1/2 square-lattice quantum antiferromagnet, the obtained ground-state energy is in reasonable agreement with the available numerical estimates.