2002/11/30 by Imre Varga, P. Thomas, Peter Thomas +4 · 1 citation
Physics and Astronomy · #Quantum and electron transport phenomena #Quantum many-body systems #Topological Materials and Phenomena #cond-mat.dis-nn #cond-mat.str-el
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevb.68.113104
published as Phys. Rev. B 68, 113104 (2003) · 4 pages, 3 EPS figures
arxiv created 2003/04/11 · openalex publication_date 2003/09/23 · arxiv updated 2009/11/30 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
A nonequilibrium occupation distribution relaxes towards the Fermi-Dirac distribution due to electron-electron scattering even in finite Fermi systems. The dynamic evolution of this thermalization process assumed to result from an optical excitation is investigated numerically by solving a Boltzmann equation for the carrier populations using a one-dimensional disordered system. We focus on the short-time-scale behavior. The logarithmically long time scale associated with the glassy behavior of interacting electrons in disordered systems is not treated in our investigation. For weak disorder and short range interaction we recover the expected result that the relaxation rate is enhanced by disorder. For sufficiently strong disorder, however, we find an opposite trend due to the reduction of scattering probabilities originating from the strong localization of the single-particle states. Long-range interaction in this regime produces a similar effect. The relaxation rate is found to scale with the interaction strength, however, the interplay between the implicit and the explicit character of the interaction produces an anomalous exponent.