In 1956 Dyson analyzed the low-energy excitations of a ferromagnet using a Hamiltonian that was non-Hermitian with respect to the standard inner product. This allowed for a facile rendering of these excitations (known as spin waves) as weakly interacting bosonic quasi-particles. More than 50 years later, we have the full denouement of non-Hermitian quantum mechanics formalism at our disposal when considering Dysons work, both technically and contextually. Here we recast Dysons work on ferromagnets explicitly in terms of two inner products, with respect to which the Hamiltonian is always self-adjoint, if not manifestly Hermitian. Then we extend his scheme to doped antiferromagnets described by the t-J model, in hopes of shedding light on the physics of high-temperature superconductivity.
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