Integrability and Disorder in Mesoscopic Systems: Application to Orbital Magnetism

TL;DR

This paper develops a semiclassical theory to analyze how weak disorder influences the magnetic response of electrons in integrable mesoscopic structures, showing that large susceptibilities are only weakly suppressed by disorder.

Contribution

It introduces a novel semiclassical framework for understanding disorder effects in integrable geometries and compares theoretical predictions with experimental data.

Findings

Zero-field susceptibility remains large despite weak disorder.

Disorder damping depends on structure size and disorder length scales in a power-law manner.

The theory extends to finite magnetic fields and matches experimental observations.

Abstract

We present a semiclassical theory of weak disorder effects in small structures and apply it to the magnetic response of non-interacting electrons confined in integrable geometries. We discuss the various averaging procedures describing different experimental situations in terms of one- and two-particle Green functions. We demonstrate that the anomalously large zero-field susceptibility characteristic of clean integrable structures is only weakly suppressed by disorder. This damping depends on the ratio of the typical size of the structure with the two characteristic length scales describing the disorder (elastic mean-free-path and correlation length of the potential) in a power-law form for the experimentally relevant parameter region. We establish the comparison with the available experimental data and we extend the study of the interplay between disorder and integrability to finite magnetic fields.