Properties of the ground state of open chains of the S=1 Heisenberg antiferromagnet are studied by a quantum Monte Carlo method. Size (length) dependences of the ground-state energy, the energy gap, the staggered magnetization 〈
Siz〉 and the spin-correlation function 〈
S1zSiz〉 are investigated under free, fixed, and periodic boundary conditions. The size dependences are significant in chains with less than 25 spins, where the magnitude of the staggered magnetization is rather large. However, the fourfold degeneracy of the ground state and the exponential decay of correlations that are inherent to the Haldane system are recovered when the chain length becomes long enough. Both the staggered magnetization and the spin-correlation function decay exponentially. The correlation length is about six in lattice spacing, which agrees with the value obtained in the bulk.
Magnetic impurities coupled antiferromagnetically to a one-dimensional Heisenberg model are studied by numerical diagonalization of chains of finite clusters. By calculating the binding energy and the correlation function, it is shown that a local singlet develops around each impurity. This holds true for systems with a single impurity, with two impurities, and for impurities forming a lattice. The local character of the singlet is found to be little affected by the presence of other impurity spins. A small effective interaction is found between a pair of impurity spins, which oscillates depending on impurity distances. For impurity lattices, the energy spectrum shows a gap which is found to be much smaller than the binding energy per impurity if the coupling constants are small. For larger coupling constants, it increases to the same order of magnitude as the binding energy, indicating that a local singlet is broken to create excited states. Impurity lattices with ferromagnetic couplings are also studied and their connection to the Haldane problem is discussed.
We study the effect of anisotropy of spin-
S impurities on an antiferromagnetic SU(2) Heisenberg chain. The magnetic impurities are assumed to have an XXZ-type anisotropic exchange with their neighboring sites. First, using density-matrix renormalization group technique, we examine spin-spin correlation function, instability of N\'eel order, and local spin susceptibility in the presence of a single spin-
S impurity. Based on the results, we find that the types of spin-
S impurities are classified into two groups: (i) nonmagnetic and
S=1 impurities enhance only short-range antiferromagnetic correlation and (ii)
S=21 and
S>1 impurities can, in contrast, stabilize a long-range N\'eel order in the disordered SU(2) Heisenberg chain. Then, we focus on the case of
S=21 impurity as a representative of (ii) and investigate the evolution of some experimentally observable quantities such as magnetization, specific heat, and magnetic susceptibility, as a function of concentration and XXZ anisotropy strength of the impurity. We confirm that the N\'eel order is induced in the bulk spin chain in the presence of finite amount of easy-axis XXZ
S=21 impurities. Furthermore, we recover some of the aforementioned features using cluster mean-field theory, which allows us to present results on experimentally accessible quantities at finite temperatures. Interestingly, in the presence of uniform magnetic field, the total magnetization exhibits a pseudogap behavior for low values of applied field. We also discuss the dependence of NMR spectrum on various XXZ impurities and identify that the spin state of Co impurity in
SrCu0.99Co0.01O2 is
S=23.
In spin‐gapped quasi‐one‐dimensional antiferromagnets that do not show phase transitions down to zero temperature, impurities cause phase transitions by inducing local magnetic moments around them between which long‐range correlation is mediated by weak interchain couplings. We investigate the difference between the effects of non‐magnetic impurities and those of spin‐1/2 magnetic ones in the impurity‐induced transition temperatures and the staggered magnetization in the impurity‐induced ordered phase by the quantum Monte Carlo method. We find that the staggered correlation induced by spin‐1/2 impurities grows slower than that done by non‐magnetic ones as the system is cooled and approaches the ground state, while the transition temperature induced by the former is higher than that done by the latter. We argue that this is one of the characteristic aspects of the order‐by‐disorder phenomena in quantum systems.
The two-dimensional Heisenberg model at zero temperature with a quantum S=1/2 impurity spin, coupled to one site, is studied. The ground state properties of the model are calculated for large coupling, in order to study the impurity-host spin local singlet formation and related local suppression of the magnetization in the host lattice. Analytic results are obtained by developing perturbation theory around the exactly solvable two-body (impurity plus neighbor) problem and compared with results obtained by exact diagonalization of small clusters. We find that perfect screening of the impurity is only achieved for infinitely large interaction, while at intermediate coupling the local magnetization is suppressed, but nonzero.