Critical properties of the metal-insulator transition in anisotropic systems

We study the three-dimensional Anderson model of localization with anisotropic hopping, i.e., weakly coupled chains and weakly coupled planes. In our extensive numerical study we identify and characterize the metal-insulator transition by means of the transfer-matrix method. The values of the critical disorder obtained are consistent with results of previous studies, including multifractal analysis of the wave functions and energy-level statistics. decreases from its isotropic value with a power law as a function of anisotropy. Using high accuracy data for large system sizes we estimate the critical exponent as . This is in agreement with its value in the isotropic case and in other models of the orthogonal universality class. Received 25 October 1999