Effect of a Spin-1/2 Impurity on the Spin-1 Antiferromagnetic Heisenberg Chain

Abstract

Low-lying excited states as well as the ground state of the spin-1 antiferro- magnetic Heisenberg chain with a spin-1/2 impurity are investigated by means of a variational method and a method of numerical diagonalization. It is shown that 1) the impurity spin brings about massive modes in the Haldane gap, 2) when the the impurity-host coupling is sufficiently weak, the phenomenological Hamiltonian used by Hagiwara {\it et al.} in the analysis of ESR experimental results for NENP containing a small amount of spin-1/2 Cu impurities is equivalent to a more realistic Hamiltonian, as far as the energies of the low-lying states are concerned, 3) the results obtained by the variational method are in semi-quantitatively good agreement with those obtained by the numerical diagonalization.