Nonmagnetic impurities in the spin-gap phase of the cuprates

Abstract

It is now well established that Zn doping of high- T C cuprates reduces their T C and triggers the appearence of a spin-glass phase. In this context, we have solved exactly the problem of N nonmagnetic impurities in the staggered flux phase of the Heisenberg model which we assume to be a good mean-field approximation for the spin-gap phase of the cuprates. In this model, the quasiparticle spectrum has four nodes on the Fermi surface, and linearization of the spectrum in the neighbourhood of these nodes leads to a system of 2D Dirac fermions. In the presence of a macroscopic number of (nonmagnetic) impurities, the problem has a characteristic logarithmic structure that renders ineffective the usual perturbative expansions. We have used this logarithmic structure to calculate an exact solution. For a concentration n i of impurities in the unitary scattering limit, the additional density of states is found to be proportional to n i /(w ln 2(|w|/D)) (where D is the infrared cut-off of the linearized spectrum) in analogy with the 1D case of doped spin–Peierls and two-leg ladders compounds. We argue that the system exhibits a quasi-long-range order at T=0 with instantaneous spin–spin correlations decreasing as n i / ln 4(n i /R ij) for large distances R ij between impurity sites. We predict enhanced low-energy fluctuations and compare these results to NMR and inelastic neutron scattering experiments in the high- T C cuprates.