Conduction mechanisms and metal–insulator transition in quasi-crystals

The aim of this theoretical work is to study the effect of quasi-periodicity and disorder on electronic transport. An efficient real-space numerical method has been developed to construct energy-filtered wave-packets in tight-binding models and to compute their time evolution. It is applied to a 3D Fibonacci quasi-lattice and electronic propagation is studied for several values of disorder and quasi-periodic potential strengths. The electronic propagation is shown to have an anomalous disorder dependence.