Thermal renormalization of the sine Gordon soliton mass

Abstract

Soliton excitations appearing in the classical statistical mechanics of the sine-Gordon chain are identified. The concept of thermal renormalization of the soliton mass is introduced and shown to be a large effect. Comparisons with recent molecular dynamics simulations are found to be very encouraging. Finally, comments are made on the relevance of these ideas for quasi-one-dimensional planar Heisenberg ferromagnets such as CsNiF 3.