Fate of spinons in spontaneously dimerized spin-1/2 ladders

We study a weakly coupled, frustrated two-leg spin-1/2 Heisenberg ladder. For vanishing coupling between the chains, elementary excitations are deconfined, gapless spin-1/2 objects called spinons. We investigate the fate of spinons for the case of a weak interchain interaction. We show that despite a drastic change in ground state, which becomes spontaneously dimerized, spinons survive as elementary excitations but acquire a spectral gap. We furthermore determine the exact dynamical structure factor for several values of momentum transfer.