Zero Modes and Thermodynamics of Disordered Spin-1/2 Ladders

TL;DR

This paper explores how nonmagnetic doping affects the thermodynamics of disordered spin-1/2 ladders, revealing zero modes' critical role and predicting divergent susceptibility and specific heat behaviors at low temperatures.

Contribution

It introduces a mapping of disordered spin ladders to a model of random mass Dirac fermions and analyzes zero modes' impact on thermodynamics, providing new theoretical predictions.

Findings

Magnetic susceptibility diverges as 1/T ln^2(1/T) at low T.

Specific heat behaves as 1/ln^3(1/T) at low T.

Results align with recent quantum Monte Carlo simulations.

Abstract

The influence of nonmagnetic doping on the thermodynamic properties of two-leg S = 1/2 spin ladders is studied in this paper. It is shown that, for a weak interchain coupling, the problem can be mapped onto a model of random mass Dirac (Majorana) fermions. We investigate in detail the structure of the fermionic states localized at an individual mass kink (zero modes) in the framework of a generalized Dirac model. The low-temperature thermodynamic properties are dominated by these zero modes. We use the single-fermion density of states, known to exhibit the Dyson singularity in the zero-energy limit, to construct the thermodynamics of the spin ladder. In particular, we find that the magnetic susceptibility $\chi$ diverges at $T\to 0$ as $1/T\ln^2(1/T)$, and the specific heat behaves as $C\propto 1/\ln^3(1/T)$. The predictions on magnetic susceptibility are consistent with the most recent results of quantum Monte Carlo simulations on doped ladders with randomly distributed impurities. We also calculate the average staggered magnetic susceptibility induced in the system by such defects.