What Do Phase Space Methods Tell Us about Disordered Quantum Systems?

Abstract

At a summer school held in fall 1991 at the PTB in Braunschweig, Bernhard Kramer proposed a book project that should encompass novel solid state research topics ranging from quantum transport to quantum chaos. This very book finally appeared at the end of 1997 under the title “Quantum transport and dissipation” [1]. Compiled between the book covers is a series of topics, some of which are usually not connected with each other in present day's research. The main subject in the first chapter is coherent transport in disordered systems. The last chapter, on the other hand, dwells on concepts such as phase space, Wigner and Husimi functions, and alike. In any case, in the description of disordered systems we do not find many works that explicitly make use of phase space concepts. This is so, although the existence of a mapping between the Anderson model and the kicked rotor [2] indeed suggests that methods employed in quantum chaos may advantageously be used to elucidate the physics at work in disordered quantum systems.