In disordered systems, directly describing electron dynamics under a driving field—as is commonly done for atoms or crystals—remains a significant challenge. However, high-order harmonic generation (HHG), which inherently encodes information about electron motion, provides a powerful tool to qualitatively probe the dependence of electron quiver amplitude on laser intensity and wavelength. In this work, we investigate the quiver amplitude of electrons in one-dimensional disordered systems designed to mimic liquids ($\alpha$ phase) and the thermal effects in crystals ($\beta$ phase). Using the minimum chain length required to converge HHG spectra as a proxy for the quiver amplitude, we find that in the $\alpha$ phase, the quiver amplitude decreases with increasing disorder but is largely insensitive to wavelength. For both phases, the quiver amplitude decreases with increasing laser intensity under weak disorder, but this trend saturates at strong disorder. Furthermore, when the nearest-neighbor distributions match, the two phases exhibit similar HHG spectra under strong fields.

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• High-order harmonic generation