Universal fluctuations and long-range correlations for wave propagation in random media

Abstract

The last few years, a large amount of effort has been devoted to the study of coherent effects in disordered systems. They essentially dealt with average values over a whole ensemble of samples and gave rise to the so-called coherent corrections of the weak localization regime. Recently, the transport properties of small disordered (mesoscopic) samples were considered from the view-point of the exact wave configuration (speckle pattern) of a given realization of the random impurity potential. A new kind of coherent effects appeared in the statistics of various properties of disordered samples like for example the universal conductance fluctuations in metals which are size-independent. These properties are shown to come from the long-range correlations in the fluctuations due to the underlying wave-field.