Delocalization and conductance quantization in one-dimensional systems attached to leads

We investigate the delocalization and conductance quantization in finite one-dimensional chains with only off-diagonal disorder coupled to leads. It is shown that the appearance of delocalized states at the middle of the band under correlated disorder is strongly dependent upon the even-odd parity of the number of sites in the system. In samples with inversion symmetry the conductance equals 2e²/h for odd samples and is smaller for even parity. This result suggests that this even-odd behavior found previously in the presence of electron correlations may be unrelated to charging effects in the sample.