One-dimensional transport revisited: A simple and exact solution for phase disorder

Abstract

Disordered systems have grown in importance in the past decades, with similar phenomena manifesting themselves in many different physical systems. Because of the difficulty of the topic, theoretical progress has mostly emerged from numerical studies or analytical approximations. Here, we provide an exact, analytical solution to the problem of uniform phase disorder in a system of identical scatterers arranged with varying separations along a line. Relying on a relationship with Legendre functions, we demonstrate a simple approach to computing statistics of the transmission probability (or the conductance, in the language of electronic transport), and its reciprocal (or the resistance). Our formalism also gives the probability distribution of the conductance, which reveals features missing from previous approaches to the problem.