Motivated by frustrated magnets and quasi-one-dimensional magnetic materials, we study the magnetic properties of one-dimensional (1D) Ising chains with nearest-neighbor (NN) and weaker next-to-nearest-neighbor (NNN) interactions in the presence of vacancy defects. The effect of a vacancy on the magnetic susceptibility of a spin chain is twofold: it reduces the length of the chain by an effective ``vacancy size'' and may also act as a free spin, a ``quasispin,'' with a Curie-type ${\ensuremath{\chi}}_{\text{quasi}}=\ensuremath{\langle}{S}^{2}\ensuremath{\rangle}/T$ contribution to the susceptibility. In chains with antiferromagnetic short-range order, the susceptibility of vacancy-free chains is exponentially suppressed at low temperatures, and quasispins dominate the effect of impurities on the chains' magnetic properties. For chains with antiferromagnetic NN interactions, the quasispin matches the value $\ensuremath{\langle}{S}^{2}\ensuremath{\rangle}=1$ of the Ising spins in the chain for ferromagnetic NNN interactions and vanishes for antiferromagnetic NNN interactions. For chains with ferromagnetic short-range order, quasispin effects are insignificant due to exponentially large low-temperature susceptibilities, and the dominant effect of a vacancy is effectively changing the length of the chain.
We study the effect of antiferromagnetic interactions on the single spin-flip Glauber dynamics of two different one-dimensional Ising models with spin $\ifmmode\pm\else\textpm\fi{}1$. The first model is an Ising chain with antiferromagnetic exchange interaction limited to nearest neighbors and subject to an oscillating magnetic field. The system of master equations describing the time evolution of sublattice magnetizations can easily be solved within a linear field approximation and a long time limit. Resonant behavior of the magnetization as a function of temperature (stochastic resonance) is found, at low frequency, only when spins on opposite sublattices are uncompensated owing to different gyromagnetic factors (i.e., in the presence of a ferrimagnetic short range order). The second model is the axial next-nearest-neighbor Ising (ANNNI) chain, where an antiferromagnetic exchange between next-nearest neighbors is assumed to compete with a nearest-neighbor exchange interaction of either sign. The long time response of the model to a weak, oscillating magnetic field is investigated in the framework of a decoupling approximation for three-spin correlation functions, which is required to close the system of master equations. The calculation, within such an approximate theoretical scheme, of the dynamic critical exponent
z, defined as $1∕\ensuremath{\tau}\ensuremath{\approx}{(1∕\ensuremath{\xi})}^{z}$ (where $\ensuremath{\tau}$ is the longest relaxation time and $\ensuremath{\xi}$ is the correlation length of the chain), suggests that the
T=0 single spin-flip Glauber dynamics of the ANNNI chain is in a different universality class than that of the unfrustrated Ising chain.