A study of disordered systems with gain: stochastic amplification

Abstract

A study of statistics of transmission and reflection from a random medium with stochastic amplification as opposed to coherent amplification is presented. It is found that the transmission coefficient t, for sample length L less than the critical length L_c grows exponentially with L. In the limit L→∞ transmission decays exponentially as <ln t>=-L/ξ where ξ is the localization length. In this limit reflection coefficient r saturates to a fixed value which shows a monotonic increase as a function of strength of amplification α . The stationary distribution of super-reflection coefficient agrees well with the analytical results obtained within the random phase approximation (RPA). Our model also exhibits the well known duality between absorption and amplification. We emphasize the major differences between coherent amplification and stochastic amplification where-ever appropriate.