Effects of nonmagnetic impurity doping in a spin ladder system with a spin gap are investigated by the exact diagonalization as well as by the variational Monte Carlo calculations. Substantial changes in macroscopic properties such as enhancements in spin correlations and magnetic susceptibilities are observed in the low impurity concentration region, which are caused by the increase of low-energy states. These results suggest that small but finite amount of nonmagnetic impurity doping relevantly causes the reduction or the vanishment of the spin gap. This qualitatively explains the experimental result of Zn-doped SrCu
2O
3 where small doping induces gapless nature. We propose a possible scenario for this drastic change as a quantum phase transition in a spin gapped ladder system due to spinon doping effects.
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 discuss the effects of nonmagnetic impurities (static holes) in the
S=1/2 Heisenberg model on a two-dimensional (2D) square lattice, and on two- and three-leg ladders. Results of quantum Monte Carlo simulations show that a free localized moment is induced around an isolated impurity only in the spin-gapped two-leg ladder, in agreement with previous theoretical expectations. The localization length of the
S=1/2 impurity moment in a two-leg ladder with isotropic couplings is $\ensuremath{\approx}1.5$ lattice spacings. In gapless ladders (odd number of legs) and in the 2D lattice, no free moments are induced. However, in the 2D system, which has antiferromagnetic long-range order at
T=0 and a gap for longitudinal fluctuations, the impurity leads to a localized distortion of the magnetization in the direction of the broken symmetry, with total
Sz=1/2. The shape of the distortion is in close agreement with previous spin-wave calculations. For all the systems, a staggered moment is induced by the impurity. For the gapped two-leg ladder this is exponentially localized within a length equal to the spin correlation length of the ladder ($\ensuremath{\approx}3.2$ lattice spacings). For the three-leg ladder, the integrated staggered moment diverges as the system size goes to infinity, but the staggered magnetization at a given site appears to vanish. In 2D, we discuss the behavior seen in finite systems both with and without additional symmetry-breaking mechanisms. We also discuss the effect of impurities on the NMR Knight shift and the bulk magnetic susceptibility.