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arXiv:cond-mat/9605048 · Journal of the Physical Society of Japan

Impurity Effect on Spin Ladder System

Yukitoshi Motome, Nobuyuki Katoh, Nobuo Furukawa, Masatoshi Imada

Published Jul 15, 1996• 47 citations
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Abstract

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$_{2}$O$_{3}$ 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.

DOI
10.1143/jpsj.65.1949

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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 SrCu2_{2}2​O3_{3}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 SrCu2O3SrCu_{2}O_{3}SrCu2​O3​. Temperature dependence of AF susceptibility shows power-law-like but weaker divergence than the single chain AFH in the temperature range studied.
We present a quantum Monte Carlo study for Heisenberg spin-12\frac{1}{2}21​ two-leg ladder systems doped with nonmagnetic impurities. The simulations are applied to the doped spin-ladder compound Sr(Cu${}_{1\ensuremath{-}x}$Znx{}_{x}x​)2{}_{2}2​O3{}_{3}3​, where a large broadening of the 65{}^{65}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=0.001x=0.001x=0.001 and x=0.0025x=0.0025x=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.
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.
The influence of nonmagnetic impurities on the spectrum and dynamical spin structure factor of a model for CuGeO3{\mathrm{CuGeO}}_{3}CuGeO3​ is studied. A simple extension to Zn-doped Sr Cu2{\mathrm{Cu}}_{2}Cu2​ O3{\mathrm{O}}_{3}O3​ is also discussed. Using exact diagonalization techniques and intuitive arguments we show that Zn doping introduces states in the spin-Peierls gap of CuGeO3{\mathrm{CuGeO}}_{3}CuGeO3​. This effect can be understood easily in the large dimerization limit where doping by Zn creates ``loose'' S=1/2 spins, which interact with each other through very weak effective antiferromagnetic couplings. When the dimerization is small, a similar effect is observed but now with the free S=1/2 spins being the resulting S=1/2 ground state of severed chains with an odd number of sites. Experimental consequences of these results are discussed. It is interesting to observe that the spin correlations along the chains are enhanced by Zn doping according to the numerical data presented here. As recent numerical calculations have shown, similar arguments apply to ladders with nonmagnetic impurities simply replacing the tendency to dimerization in CuGeO3{\mathrm{CuGeO}}_{3}CuGeO3​ by the tendency to form spin singlets along the rungs in SrCu2{\mathrm{SrCu}}_{2}SrCu2​O3{\mathrm{O}}_{3}O3​. \textcopyright{} 1996 The American Physical Society.
An inelastic neutron scattering study was performed on a Zn-substituted spin-1/2 Heisenberg 2-leg ladder compound Sr(Cu1-xZnx)2O3 (x < 0.04) to investigate nonmagnetic impurity effects on the quantum spin system with a large spin gap of about 400 K. The magnitude of the spin gap was found to be independent of Zn concentration, 33 meV, while the integrated magnetic scattering which corresponds to the singlet-triplet excitation decreased monotonically with increasing x. On account of the total-sum rule, this result supports the existence of a finite in-gap density of states at E = 0 which was suggested from the T-linear magnetic specific heat.
We present a 31P^{31}\text{P}31P NMR study of the coupled spin 12\frac{1}{2}21​ ladder compound BiCu2PO6{\text{BiCu}}_{2}{\text{PO}}_{6}BiCu2​PO6​. In the pure material, intrinsic susceptibility, and dynamics show a spin gap of about $\ensuremath{\Delta}\ensuremath{\approx}35--40\text{ }\text{K}$. Substitution of nonmagnetic Zn or magnetic Ni impurity at Cu site induces a staggered magnetization which results in a broadening of the 31P^{31}\text{P}31P NMR line while susceptibility far from the defects is unaffected. The effect of Ni on the NMR line broadening is twice that of Zn, which is consistent with quantum Monte Carlo calculations assuming that Ni couples ferromagnetically to its adjacent Cu. The induced moment follows a 1/T1/T1/T temperature dependence due to the Curie-type development of the moment amplitude while its extension saturates and does not depend on impurity content or nature. This allow us to verify the generically expected scenario for impurity doping and to extend it to magnetic impurity case: in an antiferromagnetically correlated low-dimensional spin system with antiferromagnetic correlations, any type of impurity induces a staggered moment at low temperature, whose extension is not linked to the impurity nature but to the intrinsic physics at play in the undoped pure system, from one-dimensional to two-dimensional systems.