A Few Properties of Disordered Conductors

Abstract

In this brief tutorial review, I show how phase coherent properties of disordered conductors can be described in a simple and unified way. These properties include transport properties like weak-localization correction and universal conductance fluctuations, and thermodynamic properties like orbital magnetism and persistent currents. They can be related to the classical return probability for a diffusive particle. For a network with $N$ nodes, the return probability can be related to the determinant of a $N\times N$ "connectivity" matrix $M$ so that the magnetization and the transport quantities can be {\it directly} written in term of $\det M$.

12 pages, Invited talk, International Workshop on superconductivity, magnetoresistive materials and correlated quantum systems, Rencontres du Vietnam, Hanoi 1999, p. 207 (Vietnam National University Press)