1999/01/27 by A. Pérez‐Garrido, A. Perez-Garrido, M. Ortuno +4 · 3 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #Theoretical and Computational Physics #cond-mat.dis-nn #cond-mat.str-el
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevb.59.5328
published as Phys. Rev. B, Vol 59, 5328 (1999) · 6 eps figures. To be published in Phys. Rev. B
arxiv created 1999/01/27 · openalex publication_date 1999/02/15 · arxiv updated 2009/11/30 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
We perform a numerical simulation of energy relaxation in three-dimensional electron glasses in the strongly localized regime at finite temperatures. We consider systems with no interactions, with long-range Coulomb interactions, and with short-range interactions, obtaining a power-law relaxation with an exponent of 0.15, which is independent of the parameters of the problem and of the type of interaction. At very long times, we always find an exponential regime whose characteristic time strongly depends on temperature, system size, interaction type, and localization radius. We extrapolate the longest relaxation time to macroscopic sizes and, for interacting samples, obtain values much larger than the measuring time. We finally study the number of electrons participating in the relaxation processes of very low-energy configurations.