Anisotropic magnetic excitations of a frustrated bilinear-biquadratic spin model: Implications for spin waves of detwinned iron pnictides

Elucidating the nature of spin excitations is important to understanding the mechanism of superconductivity in the iron pnictides. Motivated by recent inelastic neutron scattering measurements in the nearly 100% detwinned BaFe2As2, we study the spin dynamics of an S = 1 frustrated bilinear-biquadratic Heisenberg model in the antiferromagnetic phase with wave vector (pi, 0). The biquadratic interactions are treated in a dynamical way using a flavor-wave theory in an SU(3) representation. Besides the dipolar spin wave (magnon) excitations, the biquadratic interactions give rise to quadrupolar excitations at high energies. We find that the quadrupolar wave significantly influences, in an energy dependent way, the anisotropy between the spin excitation spectra along the (pi, 0) and (0, pi) directions in the wave vector space. Our theoretical results capture the essential behavior of the spin dynamics measured in the antiferromagnetic phase of the detwinned BaFe2As2. More generally, our results underscore the importance of electron correlation effects for the microscopic physics of the iron pnictides.