  The elementary excitations of the 1D, symmetric, spin-orbital model are
investigated by studying two anisotropic versions of the model, the pure XY and
the dimerized XXZ case, with analytical and numerical methods. While they
preserve the symmetry between spin and orbital degrees of freedom, these models
allow for a simple and transparent picture of the low--lying excitations: In
the pure XY case, a phase separation takes place between two phases with
free--fermion like, gapless excitations, while in the dimerized case, the
low-energy effective Hamiltonian reduces to the 1D Ising model with gapped
excitations. In both cases, all the elementary excitations involve simultaneous
flips of the spin and orbital degrees of freedom, a clear indication of the
breakdown of the traditional mean-field theory.
