Finite temperature line-shapes of hard-core bosons in quantum magnets: A diagrammatic approach tested in one dimension

Abstract: The dynamics in quantum magnets can often be described by effective models with bosonic excitations obeying a hard-core constraint. Such models can be systematically derived by renormalization schemes such as continuous unitary transformations or by variational approaches. Even in the absence of further interactions the hard-core constraint makes the dynamics of the hard-core bosons nontrivial. Here we develop a systematic diagrammatic approach to the spectral properties of hard-core bosons at finite temperature. Starting from an expansion in the density of thermally excited bosons in a system with an energy gap, our approach leads to a summation of ladder diagrams. Conceptually, the approach is not restricted to one dimension, but the one-dimensional case offers the opportunity to gauge the method by comparison to exact results obtained via a mapping to Jordan-Wigner fermions. In particular, we present results for the thermal broadening of single-particle spectral functions at finite temperature. The line-shape is found to be asymmetric at elevated temperatures and the band-width of the dispersion narrows with increasing temperature. Additionally, the total number of thermally excited bosons is calculated and compared to various approximations and analytic results. Thereby, a flexible approach is introduced which can also be applied to more sophisticated and higher dimensional models.