Spin Dynamics of Trimers on a Distorted Kagome Lattice

We treat the ground state, elementary excitations, and neutron scattering cross section for a system of trimers consisting of three tightly bound spins 1/2 on a distorted kagome lattice, subject to isotropic nearest-neighbor (usually antiferromagnetic) Heisenberg interactions. The interactions between trimers are assumed to be weak compared to the intratrimer interactions. We compare the spin-wave excitation spectrum of trimers with that obtained from standard spin-wave theory and attribute the differences at low energy to the fact that the trimer formulation includes exactly the effects of intratrimer zero-point motion.