Muon spin relaxation (~tSR) and nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) are powerful probes of magnetism, which have been extensively applied to studies of spin gap systems. Comparison of results obtained with the two techniques gives complementary results, as each is sensitive to different aspects of spin gap magnetism. We discuss recent ~tSR measurements of the spin ladder compounds Sr._lCu.+~O2,, pure and doped Haldane materials (Yz xCa~)Ba(Ni~ • and doped spin Peierls compounds (Cul_~Zn~)(Gel_ySiy)O 3.
Spin Relaxation in Spin Gap Systems: NMR and ~tSRSpin gap systems, which are characterized by a finite energy gap between the singlet ground state and the triplet excited states, have attracted great interest recently because they involve many fundamental aspects related to quantum magnetism [1]. The singlet ground state, which is schematically shown asa combination of spin-singlet pairs (Fig. 1), is one important feature of spin gap systems. Since each spin singlet pair is nonmagnetic, this ground state exhibits no magnetic field within the sample. Consequently, there should be no nuclear spin relaxation at T = 0 in ideal spin gala systems. If, experimentally, spin relaxation of a probe nucleus observed, the relaxation is caused by either a coupling to (1) triplet excitations which are magnetic, or (2) local imperfections of the singlet state which are associated with impurity doping.In conventional NMR measurements of undoped spin gap systems, it has been shown that the coupling to the excitation (1) is dominant at temperatures comparable to the spin gap energy (kT ~ Eg). The resulting spin relaxation is a typical T 1 relaxation with its relaxation tate (l/T1) increasing at higher temperatures [2][3][4][5][6][7]. If the temperature dependence of the gap energy is negligible, 1/T 1 has a gap-excitation type temperature dependence (1/T 1 oc exp(-Eg/kT)); previous measurements of the nuclear relaxation rate have been analyzed with this form, and the gap en-