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.
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.
Sliders control disorder strength and scattering site density; toggles switch between real-space wave packet view and energy-resolved mobility edge view; a play or pause control animates the wave's time evolution.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.