  We employ the recently proposed plaquette basis to investigate static and
dynamic properties of isotropic 2-leg Heisenberg spin ladders. Simple
non-interacting multi-plaquette states provide a remarkably accurate picture of
the energy/site and dynamic spin response of these systems. Insights afforded
by this simple picture suggest a very efficient truncation scheme for more
precise calculations. When the small truncation errors are accounted for using
recently developed Contractor Renormalization techniques, very accurate results
requiring a small fraction of the computational effort of exact calculations
are obtained. These methods allow us to determine the energy/site, gap, and
spin response of 2x16 ladders. The former two values are in good agreement with
density matrix renormalization group results. The spin response calculations
show that nearly all the strength is concentrated in the lowest triplet level
and that coherent many-body effects enhance the response/site by nearly a
factor of 1.6 over that found for 2x2 systems.
