Conductance of 1D quantum wires with anomalous electron-wavefunction localization

Abstract

We study the statistics of the conductance $g$ through one-dimensional disordered systems where electron wavefunctions decay spatially as $|\psi| \sim \exp (-\lambda r^{\alpha})$ for $0 <\alpha <1$, $\lambda$ being a constant. In contrast to the conventional Anderson localization where $|\psi| \sim \exp (-\lambda r)$ and the conductance statistics is determined by a single parameter: the mean free path, here we show that when the wave function is anomalously localized ($\alpha <1$) the full statistics of the conductance is determined by the average $<\ln g>$ and the power $\alpha$. Our theoretical predictions are verified numerically by using a random hopping tight-binding model at zero energy, where due to the presence of chiral symmetry in the lattice there exists anomalous localization; this case corresponds to the particular value $\alpha =1/2$. To test our theory for other values of $\alpha$, we introduce a statistical model for the random hopping in the tight binding Hamiltonian.