Construction of Wannier Functions in Disordered Systems

Junbo Zhu, Zhu Chen, Biao Wu

Published 2015-12-07Version 1

In this work, we propose a general method of constructing Wannier functions in disordered system out of energy eigenstates directly. This method consists of two successive operations: (i) a phase transformation setting the proper localization center; (ii) the mixing of adjacent states in energy space which sufficiently minimize the spread of the Wannier functions. The latter operation can be well approximated by a band matrix, further facilitating the calculation. Detailed illustration is given in terms of examples in one dimensional system. The generalization to higher dimensions is straightforward.