Quantum Diffusion and Delocalization for Band Matrices with General Distribution

We consider Hermitian and symmetric random band matrices H in d \geqslant 1{d \geqslant 1} dimensions. The matrix elements H _xy , indexed by x,y ? L ì \mathbbZ^d{x,y \in \Lambda \subset \mathbb{Z}^d}, are independent and their variances satisfy s_xy²:=\mathbbE |H_xy|² = W^-d f((x - y)/W){\sigma_{xy}^2:=\mathbb{E} |{H_{xy}}|^2 = W^{-d} f((x - y)/W)} for some probability density f. We assume that the law of each matrix element H _xy is symmetric and exhibits subexponential decay. We prove that the time evolution of a quantum particle subject to the Hamiltonian H is diffusive on time scales t << W^d/3{t\ll W^{d/3}} . We also show that the localization length of the eigenvectors of H is larger than a factor W^d/6{W^{d/6}} times the band width W. All results are uniform in the size |Λ| of the matrix. This extends our recent result (Erdős and Knowles in Commun. Math. Phys., 2011) to general band matrices. As another consequence of our proof we show that, for a larger class of random matrices satisfying ?_xs_xy²=1{\sum_x\sigma_{xy}^2=1} for all y, the largest eigenvalue of H is bounded with high probability by 2 + M^{-2/3 + e}{2 + M^{-2/3 + \varepsilon}} for any ${\varepsilon > 0}${\varepsilon > 0}, where M : = 1 / (max_x,ys_xy²){M := 1 / (\max_{x,y}\sigma_{xy}^2)} .