Magnetic impurities in Mott-Hubbard antiferromagnets

Abstract

A formalism is developed to treat magnetic impurities in a Mott-Hubbard antiferromagnetic insulator within a representation involving multiple orbitals per site. Impurity scattering of magnons is found to be strong when the number of orbitals N' on impurity sites is different from the number N on host sites. The impurity-scattering-induced softening of magnon modes leads to enhancement in thermal excitation of magnons, and hence to a lowering of the Neel temperature in layered or three dimensional systems. Weak impurity scattering of magnons is obtained in the case N'=N, where the impurity is represented in terms of modified hopping strength, and a momentum-independent, multiplicative renormalization of magnon energies is obtained. Split-off magnon modes are obtained when the impurity-host coupling is stronger, and implications are discussed for two-magnon Raman scattering. The mapping between antiferromagnets and superconductors is utilized to contrast formation of impurity-induced states.