Nature of Spin Excitations in Two-Dimensional Mott Insulators: Undoped Cuprates and Other Materials

We investigate the excitation spectrum of a two-dimensional resonating valence bond (RVB) state. Treating the $\pi$-flux phase with antiferromagnetic correlations as a variational ground state, we recover the long wavelength magnon as an “RVB exciton.” However, this excitation does not exhaust the entire spectral weight and the high-energy spectrum is dominated by fermionic excitations. The latter can be observed directly by inelastic neutron scattering, and we predict their characteristic energy scales along different high symmetry directions in the magnetic Brillouin zone. We also interpret experimental results on two magnon Raman scattering and midinfrared absorption within this scenario.