Non-Universal Critical Behaviors in Disordered Pseudospin-1 Systems

TL;DR

This paper reveals that disordered pseudospin-1 systems exhibit non-universal localization length divergence behaviors depending on disorder type, contrasting with universal behavior in pseudospin-1/2 systems, and introduces a new analytic method for such analyses.

Contribution

The paper introduces a new analytic method based on stack recursion equations to determine critical exponents in 1D Anderson localization, revealing non-universal behaviors in pseudospin-1 systems.

Findings

Pseudospin-1 systems show non-universal divergence exponents m depending on disorder type.

Binary disorder leads to a divergence with m=6 due to super-Klein-tunneling effect.

Adding potential fluctuations causes the exponent m to crossover from 6 to 4.

Abstract

It is well known that for ordinary one-dimensional (1D) disordered systems, the Anderson localization length $\xi$ diverges as $\lambda^m$ in the long wavelength limit ($\lambda\rightarrow \infty$ ) with a universal exponent $m=2$, independent of the type of disorder. Here, we show rigorously that pseudospin-1 systems exhibit non-universal critical behaviors when they are subjected to 1D random potentials. In such systems, we find that $\xi\propto \lambda^m$ with $m$ depending on the type of disorder. For binary disorder, $m=6$ and the fast divergence is due to a super-Klein-tunneling effect (SKTE). When we add additional potential fluctuations to the binary disorder, the critical exponent $m$ crosses over from 6 to 4 as the wavelength increases. Moreover, for disordered superlattices, in which the random potential layers are separated by layers of background medium, the exponent $m$ is further reduced to 2 due to the multiple reflections inside the background layer. To obtain the above results, we developed a new analytic method based on a stack recursion equation. Our analytical results are in excellent agreements with the numerical results obtained by the transfer-matrix method (TMM). For pseudospin-1/2 systems, we find both numerically and analytically that $\xi\propto\lambda^2$ for all types of disorder, same as ordinary 1D disordered systems. Our new analytical method provides a convenient way to obtain easily the critical exponent $m$ for general 1D Anderson localization problems.