Understand
In magnets with strong quantum fluctuations, paramagnetic ground states with or without confinement of spinon excitations can be realized.
- Here we discuss the physics of the confined phase in the vicinity of a confinement--deconfinement transition: This regime, likely relevant to a multitude of frustrated spin systems, is characterized by multiple length scales: In addition to the magnetic correlation length, a confinement length can be defined, which can be probed, e.g., by local static measurements near non-magnetic impurities.
- We illustrate the ideas by explicit calculations for dimerized spin chains, but our qualitative results remain valid in higher dimensions as well.
- In particular, we study crossover from weak to strong confinement visible in the antiferromagnetic polarization cloud around a non-magnetic impurity.