Three-dimensional effects on extended states in disordered models of polymers

Abstract

We study electronic transport properties of disordered polymers in a quasi-one-dimensional model with fully three-dimensional interaction potentials. We consider such quasi-one-dimensionallattices in the presence of both uncorrelated and short-range correlated impurities. In our procedure, the actual physical potential acting upon the electrons is replaced by a set of nonlocal separable potentials, leading to a Schrodinger equation that is exactly solvable in the momentum representation. By choosing an appropriate potential with the same spectral structure as the physical one, we obtain a discrete set of algebraic equations that can be mapped onto a tight-binding-like equation. We then show that the reflection coefficient of a pair of impurities placed at neighboring sites (dimer defect) vanishes for a particular resonant energy. When there is a finite number of such defects randomly distributed over the whole lattice, we find that the transmission coefficient is almost unity for states close to the resonant energy, and that those states present a very large localization length. Multifractal analysis techniques applied to very long systems demonstrate that these states are truly extended in the thermodynamic limit. These results are obtained with parameters taken from actual physical systems such as polyacetylene, and thus reinforce the possibility of verifying experimentally theoretical predictions about the absence of localization in quasi-one-dimensional disordered systems.