Twisted boundary conditions and transport in disordered systems

Condensed matter systems are usually characterized by their response to external fields. The Kubo linear response theory is the standard theoretical tool used to analyze it. In order to obtain transport quantities with this method, we generally need to know both the eigenvalues and the eigenfunctions. This article discusses another methodological approach which in some cases allows one to obtain some characteristics of the de dissipative transport from the response to a gauge field in a multiply connected geometry. This avoids the need of the eigenstates to characterize the transport properties which are directly read off the behavior of the energy spectrum. This method is applied to the problem of transport in metals and Anderson insulators. (C) 1997 American Institute of Physics.