Ac Response of Heterogeneous Materials: A Numerical Study

The ac and dc electrical properties of composite materials are studied using hierarchical lattices. First we show that the hierarchical model can correctly account for the main scaling properties of critical percolative structures. Then we study the effect of potential disorder by assuming that the microscopic conductances are distributed according to a power law distribution function. We find that in the limit of strong disorder, the predictions are in qualitative agreement with reported experimental measurements.