Field Theory, Scaling and the Localization Problem

Abstract

At roughly the same time as von Klitzing’s discovery of the QHE, there was an astounding development in the theory of electronic disorder. With the discovery of “weak localization”, Abrahams, Anderson, Licciardello, and Ramakrishnan (1979) were able to translate earlier scaling ideas on electronic transport into the framework of the renormalization group. Wegner (1979a) complemented the development with the formulation of a renormalizable field theory of interacting matrices. Considerable theoretical, numerical, and experimental work has been done since then in order to verify the one-parameter scaling ideas and extend the weak localization methodology in several ways. [See the articles in Anderson Localization, (Nagaoka and Fukuyama, eds. 1982).]