Aug 21, 1998

Anderson localization of electromagnetic waves in confined dielectric media

Phys. Rev. E 59, 3655 (1999)

Marian Rusek and Arkadiusz Orłowski

Anderson localization of electromagnetic waves in random arrays of dielectric cylinders confined within a planar metallic waveguide is studied. The disordered dielectric medium is modeled by a system of randomly distributed two-dimensional electric dipoles. An effective theoretical approach based on the method of images is developed. A clear distinction between isolated localized waves (which exist already in finite media) and the band of localized waves (which appears only in the limit of the infinite medium) is presented. The Anderson localization emerging in the limit of an infinite medium is observed both in finite-size scaling analysis of transmission and in the properties of the spectra of some random matrices.