We provide an intuitive understanding of the collective low-energy spin excitation of the one-dimensional spin-$\frac{1}{2}$ antiferromagnetic Heisenberg chain, known as the spinon. To this end, we demonstrate how a single spinon can be excited by adding one extra spin to the ground state. This procedure accurately reproduces all key features of the spinon’s dispersion. These follow from the vanishing norm of the excited state which is triggered by the ground state entanglement. Next, we show that the spinon dispersion can be approximately reproduced if we replace the true ground state with the simplest valence-bond solid. This proves that the spinon of the one-dimensional Heisenberg model can be understood as a single spin flowing through a valence-bond solid.

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• Antiferromagnetism
• Domain walls
• Quasiparticles & collective excitations
• Spinon
• Antiferromagnets
• Exact diagonalization
• Heisenberg model