Ising and anisotropic Heisenberg magnets with mobile defects

Motivated by experiments on (Sr,Ca,La)_14 Cu_24 O_41, a two-dimensional Ising model with mobile defects and a two-dimensional anisotropic Heisenberg antiferromagnet have been proposed and studied recently. We extend previous investigations by analysing phase diagrams of both models in external fields using mainly Monte Carlo techniques. In the Ising case, the phase transition is due to the thermal instability of defect stripes, in the Heisenberg case additional spin-flop structures play an essential role.