The properties of spin-1/2 antiferromagnetic chains with various types of random exchange coupling are studied via an asymptotically exact decimation renormalization-group transformation, which is a generalization of that introduced by Dasgupta and Ma. Random-singlet phases occur in which each spin is paired with one other spin that may be very far away; more exotic phases also occur. The behavior of typical and mean correlation functions is analyzed and found to be very different, with very small sets of spins dominating the latter at long distances as well as the low-temperature thermodynamics. Some of the phase transitions that occur between antiferromagnetically ordered phases and random singlet or other antiferromagnetic phases are also analyzed. For example, if a small uniaxial anisotropy perturbation is added to a random Heisenberg antiferromagnetic chain, a transition occurs from a random-singlet phase to an Ising antiferromagnetic phase, as the anisotropy changes sign from easy plane to easy axis. The staggered magnetization vanishes at the transition with critical exponent \ensuremath{\beta}=8/(1+ \ensuremath{\surd}7 ). Possible implications for the properties of random quantum magnetic systems in higher dimensions are briefly discussed.
We calculate the ground-state two-spin correlation functions of spin-
21 quantum Heisenberg chains with random exchange couplings using the real-space renormalization-group scheme. We extend the conventional scheme to take account of the contribution of local higher multiplet excitations in each decimation step. This extended scheme can provide highly accurate numerical data for large systems. The random average of staggered spin correlations of the chains with random antiferromagnetic (AF) couplings shows algebraic decay like
1/r2, which verifies the Fisher's analytic results. For chains with random ferromagnetic (FM) and AF couplings, the random average of generalized staggered correlations is found to decay more slowly than a power law, in the form close to
1/ln(r). The difference between the distribution functions of the spin correlations of the random AF chains and of the random FM-AF chains is also discussed.
We study the random antiferromagnetic spin-1 chain by mapping to a random dimerized spin-1/2 chain with antiferromagnetic and ferromagnetic bonds and applying an asymptotically exact real space renormalization procedure. We find that the chain undergoes an impurity driven second order phase transition from the Haldane phase to the random singlet phase as the bond distribution broadens. In the Haldane phase and near the critical point, there is a Griffiths region in which the excitation gap is filled and the magnetic susceptibility diverges in a nonuniversal manner. The correlation length critical exponent is $\ensuremath{\nu}\ensuremath{\approx}2.3$.