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Finite temperature properties of alternating ferro-antiferromagnetic Heisenberg chains

We present a study of the spin-1/2 Heisenberg chain with alternating ferro- and antiferromagnetic exchange, focusing on the role of the exchange couplings to cover both, dimer and Haldane limit. Employing a complementary combination of perturbation theory and quantum Monte Carlo simulation, we report results for the magnetic susceptibility as well as the dynamic structure factor over a wide range of coupling constants and for different temperatures to extract the spin gap. For a small ferromagnetic coupling, we find good agreement between perturbation theory and quantum Monte Carlo. For arbitrary exchange couplings we show that the dynamic structure factor, obtained from quantum Monte Carlo, scales between triplons and a Haldane chain spectrum. Finally, we contrast our findings for the spin gap versus the exchange couplings against existing literature.