2007/11/17 by Markus Mueller, L. B. Ioffe, Mueller, Markus +1 · 1 citation
Physics and Astronomy · #Disordered Systems and Neural Networks (cond-mat.dis-nn) #FOS: Physical sciences #Quantum and electron transport phenomena #Strongly Correlated Electrons (cond-mat.str-el) #Surface and Thin Film Phenomena #Theoretical and Computational Physics
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.0711.2668
openalex publication_date 2007/11/17 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
We study electronic transport in Anderson insulators with strong Coulomb interactions in dimensions d>=2. Close to the metal insulator transition where the single particle localization length is much larger than interparticle-distance, the interactions lead to a strongly correlated quantum glass phase. Even though single particle excitations are localized and the system is insulating, there are collective electronic modes which remain delocalized down to parametrically small energies. These collective excitations serve as a continuous bath which can provide the activation energy for variable range hopping transport. This circumvents the energy conservation problem arising when only discrete particle-hole excitations are present. In contrast to the weak and material-dependent phonon-assisted hopping mechanism, the activation by an electronic bath leads to a nearly universal prefactor e2/h of the Efros-Shklovskii conductance, as is observed in many recent experiments.