ABSTRACT

Wave propagation in disordered media is a rich and long-standing problem that attracts many efforts, both theoretical and experimental. After almost a century of a complete sway of radiative transport and diffusion approaches, it recently became clear that the interference of multiply-scattered elds (which is neglected in classical diffusion theory) dramatically affects all wave processes, especially in systems with ƒuctuations. The most startling manifestation of this effect is the strong localization of electromagnetic radiation in weakly-disordered random media. Since Anderson’s seminal paper,1 localization has attracted ever-increasing attention from physicists and engineers. Without attempting an exhaustive review of available literature we note that the bibliography related to this rather young area already numbers in hundreds of original articles, reviews, and books (see, e.g., the review,2 the monographs,3 and references therein). Worthy of notice are the great number of meetings dedicated to the 50 years’ anniversary of Anderson localization (half-a-year non-stop workshop in Cambridge, conferences in Paris, Dresden, Santa Barbara, etc.) where physicists, mathematicians, chemists, engineers, biologists, and even economists not only presented a plethora of new results but also formulated a great many challenging questions.