2005/10/20 by F. M. Izrailev, N. M. Makarov, M. Rendón +1 · 16 citations
Engineering · Mathematics · Physics and Astronomy · #Attenuation #Composite material #Computational physics #Condensed matter physics #Electromagnetic Simulation and Numerical Methods #Electron scattering #Geometry #Gyrotron and Vacuum Electronics Research #Hamiltonian (control theory) #Magnetic properties of thin films #Materials science #Mathematics #Mean free path #Optics #Physics #Quantum mechanics #Scattering #Square (algebra) #Surface (topology) #Surface finish #Surface roughness #cond-mat.dis-nn #cond-mat.other
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevb.73.155421
published in Physical Review B 73(15) (American Physical Society) · 13 pages, 3 figures
arxiv created 2005/10/20 · openalex publication_date 2006/04/19 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
We study a mechanism of wave and electron scattering in multimode surface-corrugated waveguides and wires. This mechanism is due to the presence of square-gradient terms in an effective Hamiltonian describing the surface scattering, which were neglected in all previous studies. With a careful analysis of the role of the roughness slopes in a surface profile, we show that these terms can strongly contribute to the expression for the inverse attenuation length Ln (mean free path). Specifically, at any fixed value of a roughness height \ensuremathσ, with a decrease of the correlation length Rc our mechanism begins to predominate over the other, known one. This predominance is due to a quite specific form of the square-gradient power spectrum as a function of Rc and arises in spite of the fact that the corresponding contribution to Ln^\ensuremath-1 is proportional to \ensuremath∝\ensuremathσ4 in contrast to standard terms proportional to \ensuremath∝\ensuremathσ2. It is remarkable that the square-gradient mechanism prevails in a widely discussed region of small-scale roughness where the corrugated surface is typically described via white noise.