Coherent potential approximation as a voltage probe

Abstract

Coherent potential approximation (CPA) has widely been used for studying the residual resistivity of bulk alloys and electrical conductivity in systems with structural disorder. Here, we revisit the single-site CPA within the Landauer-B\"uttiker approach applied to the electronic transport in layered structures and show that this method can be interpreted in terms of the B\"uttiker voltage-probe model that has been developed for treating phase-breaking scattering in mesoscopic systems. We demonstrate that the on-site vertex function, which appears within the single-site CPA formalism, plays the role of the local chemical potential within the voltage-probe approach. This interpretation allows the determination of the chemical potential profile across a disordered conductor, which is useful for analyzing results of transport calculations within the CPA. We illustrate this method by providing several examples. In particular, for layered systems with translational periodicity in the plane of the layers, we introduce the local resistivity and calculate the interface resistance between disordered layers.