Defect-induced spin-glass magnetism in incommensurate spin-gap magnets

TL;DR

This paper investigates how non-magnetic impurities induce spin-glass magnetic order in incommensurate quantum paramagnets, revealing a crossover from strong disorder to conventional glass behavior and characterizing the resulting short-range order.

Contribution

It introduces the study of defect-induced spin-glass magnetism in incommensurate spin-gap magnets, highlighting the effects of frustration and disorder, and provides numerical characterization of the spin-glass phase.

Findings

Identification of spin-glass order due to impurities in incommensurate magnets

Crossover from strong randomness to conventional glass behavior with doping

Numerical characterization of short-range order in the spin-glass phase

Abstract

We study magnetic order induced by non-magnetic impurities in quantum paramagnets with incommensurate host spin correlations. In contrast to the well-studied commensurate case where the defect-induced magnetism is spatially disordered but non-frustrated, the present problem combines strong disorder with frustration and, consequently, leads to spin-glass order. We discuss the crossover from strong randomness in the dilute limit to more conventional glass behavior at larger doping, and numerically characterize the robust short-range order inherent to the spin-glass phase. We relate our findings to magnetic order in both BiCu2PO6 and YBa2Cu3O6.6 induced by Zn substitution.