Conductivity of the disordered linear chain

The authors develop a fast algorithm for evaluating the Kubo formula for the conductivity of a linear chain, and use it to study the dependence of the conductivity as a function of imaginary frequency. The results for the Anderson model with different degrees of disorder and different energies can all be scaled onto the same curve, which is of the form expected from the theory of localised states. The universal curve obtained provides a simple connection between tight-binding model results and the conductivity which can be calculated for an electron in a white noise potential. Similar, but not identical, results are obtained for tight-binding chains with a Cauchy distribution of site energies.