UC Berkeley

We discovered unique Anderson localization behaviors of pseudospin systems in a 1D disordered potential. For a pseudospin-1 system, due to the absence of backscattering under normal incidence and the presence of a conical band structure, the wave localization behaviors are entirely different from those of conventional disordered systems. We show that there exists a critical strength of random potential ([Formula: see text]), which is equal to the incident energy ([Formula: see text]), below which the localization length [Formula: see text] decreases with the random strength [Formula: see text] for a fixed incident angle [Formula: see text] But the localization length drops abruptly to a minimum at [Formula: see text] and rises immediately afterward. The incident angle dependence of the localization length has different asymptotic behaviors in the two regions of random strength, with [Formula: see text] when [Formula: see text] and [Formula: see text] when [Formula: see text] The existence of a sharp transition at [Formula: see text] is due to the emergence of evanescent waves in the systems when [Formula: see text] Such localization behavior is unique to pseudospin-1 systems. For pseudospin-1/2 systems, there is also a minimum localization length as randomness increases, but the transition from decreasing to increasing localization length at the minimum is smooth rather than abrupt. In both decreasing and increasing regions, the [Formula: see text] dependence of the localization length has the same asymptotic behavior [Formula: see text].