Localization of elastic waves in heterogeneous media with off-diagonal disorder and long-range correlations

F. Shahbazi, Alireza Bahraminasab, S. Mehdi Vaez Allaei, Muhammad Sahimi, M. Reza Rahimi Tabar

Published 2005-04-25Version 1

Using the Martin-Siggia-Rose method, we study propagation of acoustic waves in strongly heterogeneous media which are characterized by a broad distribution of the elastic constants. Gaussian-white distributed elastic constants, as well as those with long-range correlations with non-decaying power-law correlation functions, are considered. The study is motivated in part by a recent discovery that the elastic moduli of rock at large length scales may be characterized by long-range power-law correlation functions. Depending on the disorder, the renormalization group (RG) flows exhibit a transition to localized regime in {\it any} dimension. We have numerically checked the RG results using the transfer-matrix method and direct numerical simulations for one- and two-dimensional systems, respectively.