We study the Anderson orthogonality catastrophe (AOC) in finite conductors with diffusive disorder. The disorder averaged logarithm of χ, the overlap between the ground states before and after adding a static impurity, is found to depend nonmonotonically on the disorder. In two dimensions $〈\ln {\chi }^{-1}〉\propto {\ln }^{2}N$ in the weak disorder limit, thus showing a stronger dependence on the number of electrons N than in the canonical AOC. A very broad tail of the distribution of χ, found numerically, is a signature of the importance of a few-level statistics at the Fermi energy.

• Received 26 November 2001

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevB.65.081106