Amplification and Disorder Effects on the Coherent Backscattering in a Kronig-Penney Chain of Active Potentials

Abstract

We report in this paper the analytical and numerical results on the effect of amplification on the transmission and reflection coefficient of a periodic one-dimensional Kronig-Penney lattice. A qualitative agreement is found with the tight-binding model where the transmission and reflection increase for small lengths before strongly oscillating with a maximum at a certain length. For larger lengths the transmission decays exponentially with the same rate as in the growing region while the reflection saturates at a high value. However, the maximum transmission (and reflection) moves to larger lengths and diverges in the limit of vanishing amplification instead of going to unity. In very large samples, it is anticipated that the presence of disorder and the associated length scale will limit this uninhibited growth in amplification. Also, there are other interesting competitive effects between disorder and localization giving rise to some nonmonotonic behavior in the peak of transmission.