Fermionic spin excitations in two and three-dimensional antiferromagnets

Spin excitations in an ordered Heisenberg magnet are magnons–bosons with spin 1. That may change when frustration and quantum fluctuations suppress the order and restore the spin-rotation symmetry. We show that spin excitations in the $S=1\mathrm{/}2$ Heisenberg antiferromagnet on kagome are spinons–fermions with spin 1/2. In the ground state the system can be described as a collection of small, heavy pairs of spinons with spin 0. A magnetic excitation of lowest energy amounts to breaking up a pair into two spinons at a cost of $0.06J$.