Mechanism of spin and charge separation in one-dimensional quantum antiferromagnets

We reconsider the problem of separation of spin and charge in one-dimensional quantum antiferromagnets. We show that spin and charge separation in one-dimensional strongly correlated systems cannot be described by the slave-boson or fermion representation within any perturbative treatment of the interactions between the slave holons and slave spinons. The constraint of single occupancy must be implemented exactly. As a result the slave fermions and bosons are not part of the physical spectrum. Instead, the excitations that carry the separate spin and charge quantum numbers are solitons. To prove this result, it is sufficient to study the pure spinon sector in the slave-boson representation. We start with a short-range resonating-valence-bond state spin liquid mean-field theory for the frustrated antiferromagnetic spin-1/2 chain. We derive an effective theory for the fluctuations of the Affleck-Marston and Anderson order parameters. We show how to recover the phase diagram as a function of the frustration by treating the fluctuations nonperturbatively.