Abstract
The authors are concerned with the critical properties of antiferromagnetic Takhtajan-Babujian models with spin S=1, 3/2 and 2. The leading eigenenergies of this Hamiltonian, in a finite chain, are calculated by investigating numerically and analytically the Bethe ansatz equations for the finite system. The critical exponents and the conformal anomaly are obtained from their relations with the eigenspectrum of the finite Hamiltonian. The appearance of logarithmic corrections produces poor estimates. However, a combination of analytical and numerical methods produces very good estimates. Their results strongly support the conjecture that the Wess-Zumino-Witten-Novikov non-linear sigma models with topological charge k=2S are the underlying field theories for these spin-S statistical mechanics models.