NON-RAYLEIGH STATISTICS OF WAVES IN RANDOM-SYSTEMS

We show that, when the effective disorder of a system increases, non-Rayleigh statistics characterize the intensity fluctuations of a propagating wave in a random medium. We find a single scaling parameter that describes the intensity distribution function, which depends on the conductance and transmission coefficient of the system. Our analytical results are in agreement with the results of numerical simulations, which indicates that the statistics of transmitted waves and reflected waves in restricted geometries is very different.