Anderson Localization of Matter Waves in 3D Anisotropic Disordered Potentials

Marie Piraud (1, 2, 3) , Laurent Sanchez-Palencia (4) , B. van Tiggelen (2)

1 LCF - Laboratoire Charles Fabry
2 LPM2C - Laboratoire de physique et modélisation des milieux condensés
3 LMU - Ludwig Maximilian University [Munich] = Ludwig Maximilians Universität München
4 Laboratoire Charles Fabry / Optique atomique

We develop a cut-off-free theory of Anderson localization in anisotropic disorder. 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.

Domaines: Systèmes désordonnés et réseaux de neurones [cond-mat.dis-nn]

Marie Piraud, Laurent Sanchez-Palencia, B. van Tiggelen. Anderson Localization of Matter Waves in 3D Anisotropic Disordered Potentials. 2014. ⟨hal-01058475v1⟩