Anderson Localization of Matter Waves in 3D Anisotropic Disordered Potentials

Marie Piraud (1, 2, 3) , Laurent Sanchez-Palencia (3) , B. van Tiggelen (1)

1 LPM2C - Laboratoire de physique et modélisation des milieux condensés
2 LMU - Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München
3 Laboratoire Charles Fabry / Optique atomique

Using a cutoff-free formulation of the coherent transport theory, we show that the interference terms at the origin of localization strongly affect the transport anisotropy. In contrast to the common hypothesis, we then find that the anisotropies of incoherent and coherent diffusion are significantly different, in particular at criticality. There, we show that the coherent transport anisotropy is mainly determined by the properties of the disorder-averaged effective scattering medium while the incoherent transport contributions become irrelevant.

Domains: Disordered Systems and Neural Networks [cond-mat.dis-nn]

Marie Piraud, Laurent Sanchez-Palencia, B. van Tiggelen. Anderson Localization of Matter Waves in 3D Anisotropic Disordered Potentials. Physical Review A : Atomic, molecular, and optical physics [1990-2015], 2014, 90 (6), pp.063639. ⟨10.1103/PhysRevA.90.063639⟩. ⟨hal-01058475v2⟩