Magnetic responses of randomly depleted spin ladders

TL;DR

This paper investigates the magnetic responses of doped spin-1/2 ladders with impurities, improving upon prior models, analyzing temperature effects, and comparing theoretical predictions with numerical simulations to understand impurity contributions and incommensurability effects.

Contribution

The study provides new insights into impurity effects and incommensurability in spin ladders, with improved theoretical models and comprehensive numerical analysis.

Findings

Impurities cause localized magnetic profiles and effective interactions.

Random dimer model captures impurity contributions to magnetic curves.

Incommensurability has limited impact on magnetic susceptibility.

Abstract

The magnetic responses of a spin-1/2 ladder doped with non-magnetic impurities are studied using various methods and including the regime where frustration induces incommensurability. Several improvements are made on the results of the seminal work of Sigrist and Furusaki [J. Phys. Soc. Jpn. 65, 2385 (1996)]. Deviations from the Brillouin magnetic curve due to interactions are also analyzed. First, the magnetic profile around a single impurity and effective interactions between impurities are analyzed within the bond-operator mean-field theory and compared to density-matrix renormalization group calculations. Then, the temperature behavior of the Curie constant is studied in details. At zero-temperature, we give doping-dependent corrections to the results of Sigrist and Furusaki on general bipartite lattice and compute exactly the distribution of ladder cluster due to chain breaking effects. Using exact diagonalization and quantum Monte-Carlo methods on the effective model, the temperature dependence of the Curie constant is compared to a random dimer model and a real-space renormalization group scenario. Next, the low-part of the magnetic curve corresponding to the contribution of impurities is computed using exact diagonalization. The random dimer model is shown to capture the bulk of the curve, accounting for the deviation from the Brillouin response. At zero-temperature, the effective model prediction agrees relatively well with density-matrix renormalization group calculations. Finite-temperature effects are displayed within the effective model and for large depleted ladder models using quantum Monte-Carlo simulations. In all, the effect of incommensurability does not display a strong qualitative effect on both the magnetic susceptibility and the magnetic curve. Consequences for experiments on the BiCu2PO6 compound and other spin-gapped materials are briefly discussed.