Disorder and Localization in the Lowest Landau Level

Abstract

We study the localization property of a two-dimensional noninteracting electron gas in the presence of randomly distributed short-range scatterers. We evaluate the participation number of the eigenstates obtained by exact diagonalization technique. At low impurity concentrations we obtain self-averaged values showing that all states, except those exactly at the Landau level, are localized with finite localization length. We conclude that there is no universal localization exponent and at least at low impurity concentrations localization length does not diverge.