Neutral excitations in quasi-1D strongly correlated electron systems

Novel neutral spin-0 excitation for quasi-1D systems with one electron per site are obtained within a localized scheme. Our ground state wave-function is defined by a variational localized - site cluster - expanded ansatz and these excitations are naturally built upon it. All computations are easily carried out by a transfer matrix technique that enables explicit inclusion of electron - correlation effects and, at the same time, provides a quasi - particle band - theoretic picture of these excitations. This treatment is applied, in particular, to a polyphene strip. At k=0 the energy gap corresponds to a dipole-allowed transition in the visible region, our result compares fairly well with observed decreasing transitions for finite polyphene strips. (author). 14 refs, 1 fig