A rigid commensurate host and a defect that switches: vacancies in the frustrated alternating spin-(1, 1/2) Heisenberg chain

The alternating spin-$(1,\frac{1}{2})$ Heisenberg chain with a frustrating next-nearest-neighbor coupling $J_2$ loses its Lieb–Mattis moment through a discontinuous transition to a singlet whose nature was left open. Using an SU(2)-symmetric density-matrix renormalization group, in which the total spin is a quantum-number label, we identify that phase and follow a single vacancy through it. The total spin collapses directly from $S=L\mathrm{/}4$ to $S=0$, with no partially polarized window. The singlet phase is critical: its singlet–triplet gap closes as $1\mathrm{/}L$, its entanglement entropy grows logarithmically with a central charge $c\simeq 1.8$, and its modulation wavevector, extrapolated from $L=80$ to $200$, is commensurate at $3\pi \mathrm{/}4$ and independent of $J_2$ to $5\times {10}^{-5}$. Removing the central $S=1$ site switches the ground state of the doped chain from a triplet to a singlet at $J_2^{\ast }=0.3068(3)$, where the host shows no feature; the triplet is not bound to the vacancy but spread over one of the two segments it leaves. The transmission of correlations through the vacancy saturates at a finite value below $J_2^{\ast }$, $T(\mathrm{\infty })=0.102(15)$ and $0.036(9)$ at $J_2=0.28$ and $0.30$, and the cut-chain law $T\propto L^{-1}$ is excluded on both sides. We also show that the longitudinal correlator is not an observable in a triplet sector.