Macroscopic Conductivity of Free Fermions in Disordered Media

J. -B. Bru, W. de Siqueira Pedra, C. Hertling

Published 2016-11-28Version 1

We conclude our analysis of the linear response of charge transport in lattice systems of free fermions subjected to a random potential by deriving general mathematical properties of its conductivity at the macroscopic scale. The present paper belongs to a succession of studies on Ohm and Joule's laws from a thermodynamic viewpoint. We show, in particular, the existence and finiteness of the conductivity measure $\mu _{\mathbf{\Sigma }}$ for macroscopic scales. Then we prove that, similar to the conductivity measure associated to Drude's model, $\mu _{\mathbf{\Sigma }}$ converges in the weak$^{\ast } $-topology to the trivial measure in the case of perfect insulators (strong disorder, complete localization), whereas in the limit of perfect conductors (absence of disorder) it converges to an atomic measure concentrated at frequency $\nu =0$. However, the AC--conductivity $\mu _{\mathbf{\Sigma }}|_{\mathbb{R}\backslash \{0\}}$ does not vanish in general: We show that $\mu _{\mathbf{\Sigma }}(\mathbb{R}\backslash \{0\})>0$, at least for large temperatures and a certain regime of small disorder.