Impurity-induced magnetic order in low dimensional spin gapped materials

Abstract

We have studied the effect of non-magnetic Zn impurities in the coupled spin-ladder Bi(Cu1xZnx)2PO6 using 31P NMR, muSR and Quantum Monte Carlo simulations. Our results show that the impurities induce in their vicinity antiferromagnetic polarizations, extending over a few unit cells. At low temperature, these extended moments freeze in a process which is found universal among various other spin-gapped compounds: isolated ladders, Haldane or Spin-Peierls chains. This allows us to propose a simple common framework to explain the generic low-temperature impurity induced freezings observed in low dimensional spin-gapped materials.

5 pages, 4 figures; Supplemental material at arXiv:0907.0211