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
χ diverges at
T→0 as
1/Tln2(1/T), and the specific heat behaves as
C∝1/ln3(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.
We study a class of spin-
1/2 quantum ladder models with generalized plaquette interactions in the presence of a transverse field. We show that in certain parameter regimes, these models have strong zero modes responsible for the long relaxation times of edge spins. By exploiting an infinite set of symmetries in these systems, we show how their Hamiltonians can be represented, in each symmetry sector, by a transverse field Ising chain. Due to the presence of an extensive number of conserved quantities, even if the original system has no disorder, most of these symmetry sectors feature a quasirandom transverse field profile. This representation of the ladder system in terms of a disordered Ising chain allows us to explain the features of the edge autocorrelation function of the original system. Furthermore, we find what appears to be an interesting mechanism for slow decorrelation: Even in parameter regimes where the full ladder model does not possess an obvious strong zero mode, some of the initial information stored in the edge spins can be preserved for long times as a consequence of the existence of strong zero modes within individual symmetry sectors.
We show that in double-chain Mott insulators (ladders), disordered alternating ionic potentials may locally destroy coherence of magnetic excitations and lead to the appearance of spontaneously dimerized islands inside the Haldane spin-liquid phase. We argue that a boundary between the dimerized and Haldane phases of a spin-1/2 ladder supports a localized zero-energy Majorana fermion mode. Based on these findings we suggest a realization of a generalized Kitaev model where Majorana fermions can propagate in more than one dimension.