A new approach to strongly correlated disorder

Problems involving disordered systems are usually analyzed for systems with random disorder. However, there are many systems in which the main disorder involves clusters with correlated differences between their properties and those of the average system. A new approximation, the average trace approximation, is proposed for calculating the diagonal elements of the Green function, and hence the density of states, in such systems. As an example, application of the method to a simple cubic array of harmonic oscillators shows that correlation in the disorder leads to a peak in the low frequency density of states, a result confirmed by computer simulations.