Elementary excitations of Heisenberg ferrimagnetic spin chains

We numerically investigate elementary excitations of the Heisenberg alternating-spin chains with two kinds of spins, 1 and $1/2,$ antiferromagnetically coupled to each other. Employing a recently developed efficient Monte Carlo technique as well as an exact-diagonalization method, we verify the spin-wave argument that the model exhibits two distinct excitations from the ground state which are gapless and gapped. The gapless branch shows a quadratic dispersion in the small-momentum region, which is of the ferromagnetic type. With the intention of elucidating the physical mechanism of both excitations, we make a perturbation approach from the decoupled-dimer limit. The gapless branch is directly related to spin 1's, while the gapped branch originates from cooperation of the two kinds of spins.