Strongly disordered spin ladders

The effect of quenched disorder on the low-energy properties of various antiferromagnetic spin-ladder models is studied by a numerical strong disorder renormalization-group method and by density-matrix renormalization. For strong enough disorder the originally gapped phases with finite topological or dimer order become gapless. In these quantum Griffiths phases the scaling of the energy, as well as the singularities in the dynamical quantities, are characterized by a finite dynamical exponent, z, which varies with the strength of disorder. At the phase boundaries, separating topologically distinct Griffiths phases the singular behavior of the disordered ladders is generally controlled by an infinite randomness fixed point.