Effect of size disorder on the optical transport in chains of coupled microspherical resonators

We investigate statistical properties of collective optical excitations in disordered chains of microspheres using transfer-matrix method based on nearest-neighbors approximation. Radiative losses together with transmission and reflection coefficients of optical excitations are studied numerically. We found that for the macroscopically long chain, the transmission coefficient demonstrates properties typical for a one dimensional strongly localized system: log-normal distribution with parameters obeying standard scaling relation. At the same time, we show that the distribution function of the radiative losses behaves very differently from other lossy optical systems. We also studied statistical properties of the optical transport in short chains of resonators and demonstrated that even small disorder results in significant drop of transmission coefficient acompanied by strong enhancement of the radiative losses.