Static, non-magnetic impurities give rise to gap states in a doped Mott-Hubbard antiferromagnetic insulator. The spectral and spatial features of these gap states are discussed, and it is argued that these gap states are responsible for the observed local-moment behaviour in zinc-doped cuprates.

The three-band Hubbard model — both pure and with static non-magnetic impurities — has been studied within a self-consistent numerical Hartree-Fock (HF) scheme. The system shows nesting properties only in the absence of direct O-O hopping. Spin excitations in the system are gapless with the existence of a Goldstone mode in the broken-symmetry state. The variation of spinwave velocity with Cu-site Coulomb repulsion shows a (1/(2U_d)+(1/Δ)) dependence in the strong-coupling limit. Each non-magnetic impurity in the system gives rise to two gap states for a particular spin and the local moment produced is robust even at finite concentration of mobile hole doping. The gapless Goldstone mode is preserved even in case of unequal concentration of impurities on the two sublattices.

Electronic and magnetic structures of (1 0 0) films of K and Cs, having thicknesses of one to seven layers, are calculated within the plane-wave projector augmented wave (PAW) formalism of the density functional theory (DFT), using both local spin density approximation (LSDA) and the PW91 generalized gradient approximation (GGA). Only a six-layer Cs film is found to have a ferromagnetic (FM) state which is degenerate with a paramagnetic (PM) state within the accuracy of these calculations. These results are compared with those obtained from calculations on a finite-thickness uniform jellium model (UJM), and it is argued that within LSDA or GGA, alkali metal thin films cannot be claimed to have an FM ground state. Relevance of these results to the experiments on transition metal-doped alkali metal thin films and bulk hosts are also discussed.