Reflection and transmission of waves in surface-disordered waveguides

Fundamental concepts in the quasi-one-dimensional geometry of disordered wires and random waveguides in which ideas of scaling and the transmission matrix were first introduced are reviewed. We discuss the use of the transmission matrix to describe the scaling, fluctuations, delay time, density of states, and control of waves propagating through and within disordered systems. Microwave measurements, random matrix theory calculations, and computer simulations are employed to s...

We investigate the interplay between amplitude and square-gradient scattering from the rough surfaces in multi-mode waveguides (conducting quantum wires). The main result is that for any (even small in height) roughness the square-gradient terms in the expression for the wave scattering length (electron mean free path) are dominant, provided the correlation length of the surface disorder is small enough. This important effect is missed in existing studies of the surface scatt...

We perform a detailed numerical study of the distribution of conductances $P(T)$ for quasi-one-dimensional corrugated waveguides as a function of the corrugation complexity (from rough to smooth). We verify the universality of $P(T)$ in both, the diffusive ($\bra T \ket> 1$) and the localized ($\bra T \ket\ll 1$) transport regimes. However, at the crossover regime ($\bra T \ket \sim 1$), we observe that $P(T)$ evolves from the surface-disorder to the bulk-disorder theoretical...

Planar, disordered assemblies of small particles incorporated in layered media -- sometimes called ``disordered metasurfaces'' in the recent literature -- are becoming widespread in optics and photonics. Their ability to scatter light with exotic angular and spectral features in reflection and transmission, as well as their suitability to scalable fabrication techniques, makes them promising candidates for certain applications, ranging from thin-film photovoltaics to visual a...

We developed an open-source scalar wave transport model to estimate the generalized scattering matrix (S matrix) of a disordered medium in the diffusion regime. Here, the term generalization refers to the incorporation of evanescent wave field modes in addition to propagating modes while estimating the S matrix. For that we used the scalar Kirchhoff-Helmholtz boundary integral formulation together with the Green's function perturbation method to generalize the conventional Fi...

We obtain the statistics of the intensity, transmission and conductance for scalar electromagnetic waves propagating through a disordered collection of scatterers. Our results show that the probability distribution for these quantities, x, follow a universal form x^a Exp(-x^m) . This family of functions includes the Rayleigh distribution (when a=0, m=1) and the Dirac delta function (a -> Infinity), which are the expressions for intensity and transmission in the diffusive regi...

Transport properties of a single-mode waveguide with rough boundary are studied by discrimination between two mechanisms of surface scattering, the amplitude and square-gradient ones. Although these mechanisms are generically mixed, we show that for some profiles they can separately operate within non-overlapping intervals of wave numbers of scattering waves. This effect may be important in realistic situations due to inevitable long-range correlations in scattering profiles.

We investigate the effects of wave localization on the delay time tau (frequency sensitivity of the scattering phase shift) of a wave transmitted through a disordered wave guide. Localization results in a separation tau=chi+chi' of the delay time into two independent but equivalent contributions, associated to the left and right end of the wave guide. For N=1 propagating modes, chi and chi' are identical to half the reflection delay time of each end of the wave guide. In this...

We present a numerical study on the light transport properties which are modulated by the disorder strength in quasi-one-dimensional disordered waveguide which consists of periodically arranged scatterers with random dielectric constant. The transport mean free path is found to stay inversely proportional to the square of the relative fluctuation of the dielectric constant as in the 1D and 2D cases but with . The transport properties of light through a sample with a fixed siz...

A unified theory for the conductance of a long multimode quantum wire whose finite segment has randomly rough boundaries is developed. It enables one to take account of all mechanisms of wave scattering, both related to boundary roughness and to contacts between the wire rough section and the leads within the same technical frameworks. The rough part of the conducting wire is shown to act as a mode-specific randomly modulated effective potential barrier whose height is govern...