A.C. Conductivity of a Disordered Metal

Abstract

The degenerate free Fermi gas coupled to a random potential is used to compute a.c. conductivity in various dimensions. We first formally diagonalise the hamiltonian using an appropriate basis that is a functional of the disorder potential. Then we compute the a.c. conductivity at zero temperature using the Kubo formula. This a.c. conductivity is a functional of the disordered potential. The wavefunction of extended states is written as exponential of the logarithm. We use the cumulant expansion to compute the disordered averaged a.c. conductivity for Gaussian disorder. The formula is valid if a certain linearization approximation is valid in the long-wavelength limit.