Noninteracting electrons and the metal-insulator transition in two dimensions with correlated impurities.
While standard scaling arguments show that a system of noninteracting electrons in two dimensions and in the presence of uncorrelated disorder is insulating, in this paper we discuss the case where interimpurity correlations are included. We find that for pointlike impurities and an infinite interimpurity correlation length, a mobility edge exists in 2D even if the individual impurity potentials are random. In the uncorrelated system we recover the scaling results, while in the intermediate regime for length scales comparable to the correlation length, the system behaves like a metal but with increasing fluctuations, before strong localization eventually takes over for length scales much larger than the correlation length. In the intermediate regime, the relevant length scale is given by the interimpurity correlation length, with important consequences for high mobility systems.
Hilke
M
M
Department of Physics, McGill University, Montréal, Quebec, Canada H3A 2T8. Hilke@physics.mcgill.ca