The effective conductivity of a randomly inhomogeneous medium

Using a representation of the solution to the diffusion equation in a randomly inhomogeneous medium in the form of a Feynman path integral an explicit expression is obtained for the effective conductivity in a space of arbitrary dimension. A calculation of the path integral only turns out to be possible in the case of a large-scale limit. In particular, it is shown that in the three-dimensional case the expression for the effective conductivity does not admit of an expansion in terms of the conductivity variance. This indicates that the use of standard perturbation theory in the form of an expansion in terms of the conductivity fluctuations is incorrect. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.