Anomalous impurity effect on magnetization in frustrated one-dimensional ferro- and ferrimagnets

TL;DR

This paper predicts a significant reduction in spontaneous magnetization in frustrated 1D ferro- and ferrimagnets caused by non-magnetic impurities, confirmed through numerical methods, with implications for material design.

Contribution

It introduces a novel understanding of impurity effects on magnetization in frustrated 1D magnetic systems using advanced numerical techniques.

Findings

Single impurities can cause total spin to vanish in finite chains.

Magnetization can decrease by about 40% with infinitesimal impurity density.

Conditions for materials exhibiting this effect are proposed.

Abstract

Significant decrease of spontaneous magnetization in frustrated one-dimensional ferro- and ferrimagnets due to non-magnetic impurities is predicted. Using the density-matrix renormalization group method and the exact diagonalization method, we confirm that the total spin can vanish due to a single impurity in finite chains. Introducing the picture of magnetic domain inversion, we numerically investigate the impurity-density dependence of magnetization. In particular, we show that even with an infinitesimal density of impurities the magnetization in the ground state is reduced by about 40% from that of the corresponding pure system. Conditions for the materials which may show this anomalous impurity effect are formulated.