Mobility edges in off-diagonal disordered tight-binding models

Abstract

We study the one-dimensional tight-binding models which include a slowly varying, incommensurate off-diagonal modulation on the hopping amplitude. Interestingly, we find that the mobility edges can appear only when this off-diagonal (hopping) disorder is included in the model, which is different from the known results induced by the diagonal disorder. We further study the situation where the off-diagonal and diagonal disorder terms (the incommensurate potential) are both included and find that the locations of mobility edges change significantly and the varying trend of the mobility edge becomes nonsmooth. We first identify the exact expressions of mobility edges of both models by using asymptotic heuristic argument, and then verify the conclusions by utilizing several numerical diagnostic techniques, including the inverse participation ratio, the density of states and the Lyapunov exponent. This result will perspectives for future investigations on the mobility edge in low dimensional correlated disordered system.