Statistical scattering of waves in disordered waveguides: Universal properties

The statistical theory of certain complex wave interference phenomena, like the statistical fluctuations of transmission and reflection of waves, is of considerable interest in many fields of physics. In this article, we shall be mainly interested in those situations where the complexity derives from the quenched randomness of scattering potentials, as in the case of disordered conductors, or, more in general, disordered waveguides.In studies performed in such systems one has found remarkable statistical regularities, in the sense that the probability distribution for various macroscopic quantities involves a rather small number of relevant physical parameters, while the rest of the microscopic details serves as mere “scaffolding”. We shall review past work in which this feature was captured following a maximum-entropy approach, as well as later studies in which the existence of a limiting distribution, in the sense of a generalized central-limit theorem, has been actually demonstrated. We then describe a microscopic potential model that was developed recently, which gives rise to a further generalization of the central-limit theorem and thus to a limiting macroscopic statistics.