Long-range interactions and Anderson localisation for one-dimensional high-contrast resonator chain

Abstract

Spectral and transport properties of high-contrast resonator systems can be described in the subwavelength regime in terms of the so-called capacitance operator. In this paper, we consider an infinitely periodic chain of high-contrast resonators in three dimensions. The first result is a precise estimate of the off-diagonal decay rate of the capacitance operator $C$. Importantly, we demonstrate that the decay rate is long-range and critical: as $|n-m|\to\infty$, \begin{equation*} C(n,m)\sim \frac{1}{|n-m|\log^2|n-m|}, \end{equation*} which is $\ell^1$ summable but slower than quadratic. This borderline decay of the off-diagonal entries makes the present proof of Anderson localisation with arbitrary disorder, which is observed numerically in this paper, out of reach; we hope that this physical example of classical wave systems with critical long-range interactions provides new insight in the field of Anderson localisation. As the second main result, based on the off-diagonal decay estimate, we prove a strong convergence of the finite capacitance operator, which corresponds to a truncated chain, to the capacitance operator as the size of the truncated chain grows to infinity. Using this strong convergence, we improve the results of [Ammari et al., SIAM J. Math. Anal., 2023 and Bull. London Math Soc., 2025] by presenting a rigorous estimate of the convergence rate of the spectrum.