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Anomalous thermal broadening from an infrared catastrophe in two-dimensional quantum antiferromagnets

The nature of quasiparticles in 2D quantum antiferromagnets at finite temperature remains an open question despite decades of theoretical work. In particular, it is not fully understood how long wavelength excitations contribute to significant broadening of the experimentally observable spectrum. Motivated by this problem, we consider the $XY$ model of easy-plane antiferromagnets, and compute the dynamic structure factor by direct summation of diagrams. In doing so, we find that non-interacting quasiparticles with infinite lifetimes can still lead to a broad response. This forms the basis for a new paradigm describing the interaction of experimental probes with a physical system, where broadening is due neither to the lifetime, nor to the emergence of fractional quasiparticles. Instead, strong fluctuations drive the probe to absorb and radiate an infinite number of arbitrarily low energy quasiparticles, leading us to draw parallels with the infrared catastrophe in quantum electrodynamics.