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🌀 Anderson Localization: How Disorder Traps Waves

Explore how quantum waves become trapped by random disorder instead of spreading freely, the physics behind the Nobel Prize-winning discovery that disorder alone can turn a conductor into an insulator.

Physics & Mechanics3DModerate60 FPS

This simulation visualizes how a quantum wave packet propagating through a lattice of random scatterers transitions from spreading diffusively at low disorder to becoming exponentially trapped at high disorder, letting you watch the Anderson transition and the mobility edge emerge directly from wave interference.

🔬 What It Demonstrates

🎮 How to Use

Adjust the disorder strength slider to change how randomly the scattering sites are arranged, then watch the wave packet's evolution over time. Toggle between weak and strong disorder to compare diffusive spreading against localized trapping, and inspect the energy-resolved view to see the mobility edge separating extended from localized states.

💡 Did You Know?

Anderson localization was so far ahead of its experimental era that it took until the 1980s and beyond for physicists to confirm it cleanly, and some of the most convincing demonstrations have come not from solids at all but from laser light in cloudy materials and from ultracold atom clouds released into speckled laser light decades after Anderson's original 1958 paper.

⚙ Under the hood

Explore Anderson localization, the quantum interference effect where enough disorder in a material traps electron waves and turns a conductor into an insulator.

anderson-localizationquantum-mechanicsdisordercondensed-mattermobility-edgewave-interferencephysicssolid-state-physics

3D · Three.js / WebGL renderer · 60 FPS target · runs fully client-side, no install