Ba2CuTeO6 has attracted significant
attention
as it contains a two-leg spin ladder of Cu2+ cations that
lies in close proximity to a quantum critical point. Recently, Ba2CuTeO6 has been shown to accommodate chemical substitutions,
which can significantly tune its magnetic behavior. Here, we investigate
the effects of substitution for non-magnetic Zn2+ impurities
at the Cu2+ site, partitioning the spin ladders. Results
from bulk thermodynamic and local muon magnetic characterization on
the Ba2Cu1 – x
Zn
x
TeO6 solid solution (0
≤ x ≤ 0.6) indicate that Zn2+ partitions the Cu2+ spin ladders into clusters and can
be considered using the percolation theory. As the average cluster
size decreases with increasing Zn2+ substitution, there
is an evolving transition from long-range order to spin-freezing as
the critical cluster size is reached between x =
0.1 to x = 0.2, beyond which the behavior became
paramagnetic. This demonstrates well-controlled tuning of the magnetic
disorder, which is highly topical across a range of low-dimensional
Cu2+-based materials. However, in many of these cases,
the chemical disorder is also relatively strong in contrast to Ba2CuTeO6 and its derivatives. Therefore, Ba2Cu1 – x
Zn
x
TeO6 provides an ideal model system for
isolating the effect of defects and segmentation in low-dimensional
quantum magnets.