Density of reflection resonances in one-dimensional disordered Schrödinger operators

Abstract

We develop an analytic approach to evaluating the density $ρ({\cal E},Γ)$ of complex resonance poles with real energies $\mathcal{E}$ and widths $Γ$ in the pure reflection problem from a one-dimensional disordered sample with white-noise random potential. We start with establishing a general link between the density of resonances and the distribution of the reflection coefficient $r=|R(E,L)|^2$, where $R(E,L)$ is the reflection amplitude, at {\it complex} energies $E = {\cal E} +iη$, identifying the parameter $η>0$ with the uniform rate of absorption within the disordered medium. We show that leveraging this link allows for a detailed analysis of the resonance density in the weak disorder limit. In particular, for a (semi)infinite sample, it yields an explicit formula for $ρ({\cal E},Γ)$, describing the crossover from narrow to broad resonances in a unified way. Similarly, our approach yields a limiting formula for $ρ({\cal E},Γ)$ in the opposite case of a short disordered sample, with size much smaller than the localization length. This regime seems to have not been systematically addressed in the literature before, with the corresponding analysis requiring an accurate and rather non-trivial implementation of WKB-like asymptotics in the scattering problem. Finally, we study the resonance statistics numerically for the one-dimensional Anderson tight-binding model and compare the results with our analytic expressions.