Abstract. The transmission through a stack of identical slabs that are separated by gaps with random widths is usually treated by calculating the average of the logarithm of the transmission probability. We show how to calculate the average of the transmission probability itself with the aid of a recurrence relation and derive analytical upper and lower bounds. The upper bound, when used as an approximation for the transmission probability, is unreasonably good and we conjecture that it is asymptotically exact.

Print publication: Issue 1 (January 2010)
Received 31 July 2009, in final form 2 August 2009
Published 4 November 2009