THE ANDERSON LOCALIZATION

ANDERSON, P. W.

Absence of Diffusion in Certain Random Lattices.

Lancaster and New York, American Institute of Physics, 1958. Lex8vo. Volume 109, March 1, No. 5, 1958 of "The Physical Review", Second Series. In the original printed blue wrappers. Slight traces of wear to spine. Previous owner's stamp to front wrapper (C. Møller). Internally fine and clean. Pp. 1492-1505. [Entire issue: Pp. 1407-1862].

First edition of Anderson's seminal paper, in which he laid the foundation for a quantum-mechanical theory of transport in systems with a certain generic type of disorder involving onsite energy randomness. This is also known as the Anderson localization. On the basis of the discovery presented in the present article which led to investigations into the electronic structure of magnetic and disordered systems, Anderson was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1977. The discovery has allowed for the development of electronic switching and memory devices in computers.

"Disorder-induced electron localization, i.e. Anderson localization, was first predicted by Andersonin 1958 [in the present paper]. In his pioneering paper, the continuity or discontinuity of the energy spectrum of electrons on a diagonally disordered system is related to their localization property." (Nakayama, Fractal concepts in condensed matter physics, 2003, p. 117)

"Anderson's model ushered in a new quantum mechanical view of metal-insulator transitions. And in the early 1960s, Nevill Mott introduced the notion of a mobility edge that separates extended and localized states. The idea of a mobility edge would develop into one of the most studied concepts of condensed-matter physics. For their work on disordered systems, Anderson, his thesis adviser John van Vleck, and Mott shared the 1977 Nobel Prize in Physics.
Ironically, Anderson's 1958 paper hardly got noticed at first; it was cited just 30 times in the first 10 years. Today, it's been cited over 4000 times, though too often as an "unrecognizable monster" as described by its creator in 1983. Indeed, theoreticians have found a variety of ways to look at localization - from scale-dependent diffusion and fractal wavefunctions to quantum chaos, dense-point spectra, and kicked rotors." (Fifty years of Anderson localization Physics Today, August 2009).

Order-nr.: 43433