Boundary conditions, the critical conductance distribution, and one-parameter scaling - art. no. 155107

We study the influence of boundary conditions transverse to the transport d irection for disordered mesoscopic conductors both at the Anderson metal-in sulator transition and in the metallic regime. We show that the boundary co nditions strongly influence the conductance distribution exactly at the met al-insulator transition and we discuss implications for the standard pictur e of one-parameter scaling. We show in particular that the scaling function that describes the change of conductance with system size depends on the b oundary conditions from the metallic regime up to the metal-insulator trans ition. An experiment is proposed that might test the correctness of the one -parameter scaling theory.