Quasispins of vacancy defects and their interactions in disordered antiferromagnets

Vacancy defects in disordered magnetic materials are known to act as effective spins, “quasispins”, in response to an external magnetic field. In the dilute limit, the contributions of such “quasispins” to the magnetic susceptibility χ_vac(T)∝ N_vac/T are singular in the limit of low temperatures T and match those of free spins. With increasing the density of vacancies, their interactions may become essential. Motivated by frustrated and quasi-one-dimensional magnetic materials, we study analytically quasispins and their interactions in a generic system that has short-range antiferromagnetic order and lacks long-range order. We predict that if the vacancy defect does not disrupt the short-range antiferromagnetic order around it, the quasispin value matches the value of spins of the magnetic atoms in the material, and the correlators of the quasispins of different vacancies match the spin-spin correlators in the vacancy-free material. We confirm our conclusions by exact calculations for Ising chains with nearest-neighbour and next-to-nearest-neighbour interactions. We also compute the first virial correction to the susceptibility of a magnetic material due to the interactions of vacancy quasispins.