Collective excitations in ferrimagnetic Heisenberg ladders

We study ground-state properties and the low-lying excitations of Heisenberg spin ladders composed of two ferrimagnetic chains with alternating site spins $(S_1>S_2)$ by using the bosonic Dyson-Maleev formalism and Lanczos numerical techniques. The emphasis is on properties of the ferrimagnetic phase which is stable for antiferromagnetic interchain couplings $J_{\perp}\geq 0$. There are two basic implications of the underlying lattice structure: (i) the spin-wave excitations form folded acoustic and optical branches in the extended Brillouin zone and (ii) the ground state parameters (such as the on-site magnetizations and spin-stiffness constant) show a crossover behavior in the weak-coupling region $0<J_{\perp}<1$. The above peculiarities of the ladder ferrimagnetic state are studied up to second order in the quasiparticle interaction and by a numerical diagonalization of ladders containing up to N=12 rungs. The presented results for the ground-state parameters and the excitation spectrum can be used in studies on the low-temperature thermodynamics of ferrimagnetic ladders.