Weakly disordered spin ladders

Abstract

We analyze an anisotropic spin 1/2 two legs ladder in the presence of various type of random perturbations. The generic phase diagram for the pure system, in a way similar to spin one chains, consists of four phases: an Antiferromagnet, a Haldane gap or a Singlet phase (depending on the sign of interchain coupling) and two XY phases designated by XY1 and XY2. The effects of disorder depend crucially on whether it preserves XY symmetry (random field along z and random exchange) or not (random anisotropy or random XY fields). The singlet phases and the massless XY1 phase are totally unaffected by disorder in stark contrast with the single chain case. On the other hand the XY2 phase is very strongly suppressed. Disorder breaking XY symmetry has much stronger effects and most of the phases at the exception of the singlet one are destroyed. Interestingly, the disordered XY1 phase has a much shorter correlation length than the disordered XY2 phase contrarily with the case of perturbations preserving the rotation symmetry around the z axis.