Doping Induced Magnetization Plateaus

Abstract

The low temperature magnetization process of antiferromagnetic spin-S chains doped with mobile spin-(S-1/2) carriers is studied in an exactly solvable model. For sufficiently high magnetic fields the system is in a metallic phase with a finite gap for magnetic excitations. In this phase which exists for a large range of carrier concentrations x the zero temperature magnetization is determined by x alone. This leads to plateaus in the magnetization curve at a tunable fraction of the saturation magnetization. The critical behaviour at the edges of these plateaus is studied in detail.