  Magnetic impurities coupled antiferromagnetically to a one-dimensional
Heisenberg model are studied by numerical diagonalization of chains of finite
clusters. By calculating the binding energy and the correlation function, it is
shown that a local singlet develops around each impurity. This holds true for
systems with a single impurity, with two impurities, and for impurities forming
a lattice. The local character of the singlet is found to be little affected by
the presence of other impurity spins. A small effective interaction is found
between a pair of impurity spins, which oscillates depending on impurity
distances. For impurity lattices, the energy spectrum shows a gap which is
found to be much smaller than the binding energy per impurity if the coupling
constants are small. For larger coupling constants, it increases to the same
order of magnitude as the binding energy, indicating that a local singlet is
broken to create excited states. Impurity lattices with ferromagnetic couplings
are also studied and their connection to the Haldane problem is discussed.
