The spin and charge excitations of the t-J ladder are studied by exact diagonalization techniques for several electron densities. The various modes are classified according to their spin (singlet or triplet excitations) and their parity under a reflection with respect to the symmetry axis along the chains and a finite-size scaling of the related gaps is performed. At low doping, formation of hole pairs leads to a spin gap for all J/t ratios. This phase is characterized by (at least) one vanishing energy mode only in the charge bonding channel when
Kx\ensuremath{\rightarrow}0 consistent with the existence of superconducting pairing correlations. At larger doping the spin gap disappears. Although the antibonding modes remain gapped, low-energy
Kx\ensuremath{\sim}0 and
Kx\ensuremath{\sim}2
kF spin and charge bonding modes are found consistent with a single-band Luttinger scenario. At sufficient low electron density and above a critical value of J/t we also expect another phase of electron pairs with gapped spin excitations.
Exact-diagonalization studies for a doped t-J ladder (or double chain) show hole pairing in the ground state. The excitation spectrum separates into a limited number of quasiparticles which carry charge +\ensuremath{\Vert}e\ensuremath{\Vert} and spin 1/2 and a triplet mode. At half-filling the former vanish but the latter evolves continuously into the triplet band of the spin liquid. At low doping the quasiparticles form a dilute Fermi gas with a strong attraction but simultaneously the Fermi wave vector, as would be measured in photoemission, is large.
We have numerically investigated the doped t-J ladder using exact diagonalization. We have studied both the limit of strong interchain coupling and isotropic coupling. The ladder scales to the Luther-Emery liquid regime in the strong interchain coupling limit. In this strong coupling limit there is a simple picture of the excitation spectrum that can be continued to explain the behavior at isotropic coupling. At J=0 we have indications of a ferromagnetic ground state. At a large J/t the ladder is phase separated into holes and a Heisenberg ladder. At intermediate coupling the ground state shows hole pairing with a modified d-wave symmetry. The excitation spectrum separates into a limited number of quasiparticles which carry charge +\ensuremath{\Vert}e\ensuremath{\Vert} and spin 1/2 and a triplet magnon mode. At half filling the former vanish but the latter evolves continuously into the magnon band of the spin liquid. At low doping the quasiparticles form a dilute Fermi gas with a strong attraction but simultaneously the Fermi wave vector, as would be measured in photoemission, is large. The dynamical structure factors are calculated and are found to be very similar to calculations on two-dimensional clusters. \textcopyright{} 1996 The American Physical Society.
The two-leg $t\ensuremath{-}J$ ladder forms a spin liquid at half filling that evolves to a Luther-Emery liquid upon doping. Our aim is to obtain a complete phase diagram for isotropic coupling (i.e., rungs and legs equal) as a function of electron density n and the ratio
J/t. Two known limiting cases are
n<21, which is a single band Luttinger liquid, and small hole doping $\ensuremath{\delta}\ensuremath{\ll}1$ for $J/\stackrel{\ensuremath{\rightarrow}}{t}0,$ which is a Nagaoka ferromagnet. Using Lanczos techniques we examine the region between the Nagaoka and Luther-Emery phases for
1>n>21. We find evidences for gapless behavior in both spin and charge channels for
J/t<0.3, consistent with Luttinger liquids in both bonding and antibonding bands (i.e.,
C2S2). This proposal is based on the behavior of spin and charge correlation functions. For example, the hole-hole correlation function that displays hole pairing at larger
J/t shows hole-hole repulsion in this region. As a further test, we examined the dependence of the energy on a relative phase shift between bonding and antibonding bands. For
J/t<0.3 this is very weak, indicating a lack of pairing between these channels.
The properties of antiferromagnetic Heisenberg S= 1/2 ladders with two, three and four chains are expanded in the ratio of the intrachain and interchain coupling constants. A simple mapping procedure is introduced to relate the four- and two-chain ladders, which keeps to moderate values of the expansion parameters. A second-order calculation of the spin gap to the lowest triplet excitation in the two- and four-chain ladders is found to be quite accurate, even at the isotropic point where the couplings are equal. Similar expansions and mapping procedures are presented for the three-chain ladders, which are in the same universality class as single chains.
We discuss the effect of weak bond disorder in two-leg spin ladders on the dispersion relation of the elementary triplet excitations with a particular focus on the appearance of bound states in the spin gap. Both the cases of modified exchange couplings on the rungs and the legs of the ladder are analyzed. Based on a projection on the single-triplet subspace, the single-impurity and small cluster problems are treated analytically in the strong-coupling limit. Numerically, we study the problem of a single impurity in a spin ladder by exact diagonalization to obtain the low-lying excitations. At finite concentrations and to leading order in the inter-rung coupling, we compare the spectra obtained from numerical diagonalization of large systems within the single-triplet subspace with the results of diagrammatic techniques, namely, low-concentration and coherent-potential approximations. The contribution of small impurity clusters to the density of states is also discussed.