Spin bags in the doped t-J model

We present a nonperturbative method for deriving a quasiparticle description of the low-energy excitations in the t-J model for strongly correlated electrons. Using the exact diagonalization technique we evaluated exactly the spectral functions of composite operators, which describe an electron or hole dressed by antiferromagnetic spin fluctuations as expected in the string or spin bag picture. For hole doping up to 1/8, use of the composite operators leads to a drastic simplification of the single-particle spectral function: at half-filling it takes free-particle form, for the doped case it resembles a system of weakly interacting fermions corresponding to the doped holes. We conclude that for all doping levels studied, the elementary electronic excitations next to the Fermi level are adequately described by the antiferromagnetic spin-fluctuation picture.