Magnetic correlations are studied in a two-leg Hubbard ladder doped with nonmagnetic impurities using finite temperature quantum Monte Carlo (FTQMC) method. A number of relevant macroscopic quantities calculated as a function of temperature T and impurity concentration are found to exhibit significantly renormalized behavior, a feature noted in many experiments. The uniform magnetic susceptibility χ0(T) for the impurity doped system shows a cusplike behavior followed by a sharp increase at lower temperatures, signaling the formation of impurity induced free magnetic moments, while it diminishes rapidly for the pure system. The spin correlations are found to increase in the vicinity of an impurity. To investigate the effect of nonmagnetic impurities on the spin wave modes in the system, spin wave velocity vsw is calculated as a function of impurity concentration. The result shows that vsw is reduced by nonmagnetic impurities, indicating softening of the modes. Simulations are performed slightly away from half filling and kinetic energy of the electrons in the neighborhood of an impurity site is calculated to study the interplay between impurities and holes. However, contrary to previous experimental observations on two dimensional lattices where nonmagnetic impurities reduce hole mobility, no noticeable effect of impurity on the mobility of the neighboring electrons is found in our calculation.
We present a quantum Monte Carlo study for Heisenberg spin-
21 two-leg ladder systems doped with nonmagnetic impurities. The simulations are applied to the doped spin-ladder compound Sr(Cu${}_{1\ensuremath{-}x}$Zn
x)
2O
3, where a large broadening of the
65Cu NMR lines has been observed in experiment at low temperatures but far above the N\'eel temperature. We find that interladder couplings with a sizable coupling in the stacking direction are required to describe the line broadening, which cannot be explained by considering a single ladder only. Around a single impurity, spin correlations cause an exponentially decaying antiferromagnetic local magnetization in a magnetic field. We develop an effective model for the local magnetization of systems with many randomly distributed impurities, with few parameters which can be extracted out of quantum Monte Carlo calculations with a single impurity. The broadening arises from a drag effect, where the magnetization around an impurity works as an effective field for spins on the neighboring ladders, causing a nonexponentially decaying magnetization cloud around the impurity. Our results show that even for impurity concentrations as small as
x=0.001 and
x=0.0025, the broadening effect is large, in good quantitative agreement with experiment. We also develop a simple model for the effective interaction of two impurity spins.
Effects of nonmagnetic impurity doping on an AF spin-1/2 Heisenberg ladder system are studied by the QMC method. A single nonmagnetic impurity induces a localized spin-1/2 moment accompanied by "static" and enhanced AF correlations around it. Small and finite concentration of impurities induces a remarkable change of magnetic and thermodynamic properties with gapless excitations. It also shows rather sharp but continuous crossover around the concentration of about 4%. Above the crossover concentration, all the spins are strongly coupled participating in the enhanced and rather uniform power-law decay of the antiferromagnetic correlation. Below the crossover, each impurity forms an antiferromagnetic cluster only weakly coupled each other. For random distribution of impurities, large Curie-like susceptibility accompanied with small residual entropy is obtained at low temperatures in agreement with recent experimental observation in Zn-doped
SrCu2O3. Temperature dependence of AF susceptibility shows power-law-like but weaker divergence than the single chain AFH in the temperature range studied.
We report characteristics of impurity-induced staggered polarization (IISP) and antiferromagnetic long-range order (AF-LRO) in the gapped spin-1/2 Heisenberg two-leg ladder compound
SrCu2O3 (Sr123). We have carried out comprehensive NMR and NQR investigations on three impurity-doped systems, $\mathrm{Sr}({\mathrm{Cu}}_{1\ensuremath{-}x}{M}_{x}{)}_{2}{\mathrm{O}}_{3} (M=\mathrm{Z}\mathrm{n},\mathrm{}\mathrm{Ni})$ with
x< 0.02 and ${\mathrm{Sr}}_{1\ensuremath{-}x}{\mathrm{La}}_{x}{\mathrm{Cu}}_{2}{\mathrm{O}}_{3}$ with
x< 0.03. Either the Zn or Ni impurity that is nonmagnetic depletes a single spin on the ladders, whereas the La impurity is believed to dope electrons onto the ladders. The width of the Lorentzian Cu NMR spectrum increases with the increase in impurity content x and follows the Curie-like temperature (T) dependence as
W/T. The W's for the Zn- and Ni-doped samples (M doping) are larger than for the La-doped one (La doping). The NMR spectra were fit by assuming that unpaired spin
S0=1/2 induced next to impurity on the rung for the Zn and Ni doping
(S0=1/4 for the La doping) creates the staggered spin polarization along the leg, which decreases exponentially from
S0. In Sr123, an instantaneous spin-correlation length ${\ensuremath{\xi}}_{0}$ was theoretically predicted as ${\ensuremath{\xi}}_{0}/a\ensuremath{\sim}3\ensuremath{-}8,$ where a is the lattice spacing between the Cu sites along the leg. However, a correlation length ${\ensuremath{\xi}}_{s}/a$ estimated from the IISP along the leg was found to be much longer than ${\ensuremath{\xi}}_{0}/a$ in
x=0.001 and 0.005. The notable result is that ${\ensuremath{\xi}}_{s}/a$ that was found to be T independent is scaled to mean distances
DAV=1/(2x) between the Zn and Ni impurities and
DAV=1/x between the La impurities. When
DAV=500 for
x=0.001 (Zn doping), ${\ensuremath{\xi}}_{s}/a\ensuremath{\sim}50$ is estimated. The significantly broadened NQR spectrum has provided unambiguous evidence for the AF-LRO in the Zn and Ni doping (x=0.01 and 0.02). Rather uniform AF moments at the middle Cu sites between the impurities are estimated to be about $0.04{\ensuremath{\mu}}_{B}$ at 1.4 K along the a axis. By assuming that exponential decay constants of AF moments are equivalent to ${\ensuremath{\xi}}_{s}/a$'s for the IISP, the size of an AF moment next to the impurity is deduced as ${S}_{\mathrm{AF}}\ensuremath{\sim}1/4.$ We propose that these exponential distributions of IISP and AF moments along the two-leg suggest that an interladder interaction is in a weakly coupled quasi-one-dimensional (WC-Q1D) regime. The formula of ${T}_{N}{=J}_{0}\mathrm{exp}(\ensuremath{-}{D}_{\mathrm{AV}}/({\ensuremath{\xi}}_{s}/a))$ based on the WC-Q1D model explains
TN(exp)=3 K
(x=0.01) and 5.8 K
(x=0.02) quantitatively and predicts to be as small as
TN=0.09 K for
x=0.001 using
J0=2000 K. On the other hand, there is no evidence of AF-LRO for the La doping
(x=0.02 and 0.03) down to 1.4 K, nevertheless their ${\ensuremath{\xi}}_{s}/a$'s are almost equivalent to those in the Zn and Ni doping
(x=0.01 and 0.02). We remark that the Q1D-IISP is dramatically enhanced by the interladder interaction even though so weak, once the impurity breaks up the quantum coherence in the short-range resonating valence bond (RVB) state with the gap. On the one hand, we propose that
TN is determined by a strength of the interladder interaction and a size of
S0.