Dissipative processes in low density strongly interacting 2D electron systems

A glassy phase in disordered two dimensional (2D) electron systems may exist at low temperatures for electron densities lying intermediate between the Fermi liquid and Wigner crystal limits. The glassy phase is generated by the combined effects of disorder and the strong electron-electron correlations arising from the repulsive Coulomb interac- tions. Our approach here is motivated by the observation that at low electron densities the electron pair correlation function, as numerically determined for a non-disordered 2D system from Monte Carlo simulations, is very similar to the pair correlation function for a 2D classical system of hard discs. This suggests that theoretical approaches to 2D classical systems of hard discs may be of use in studying the disordered, low density electron problem. We use this picture to study its dynamics on the electron-liquid side of a glass transition. At long times the major relaxation process in the electron-liquid will be a rearrangement of increasingly large groups of the discs, rather than the movement of the discs separately. Such systems have been studied numerically and they display all the characteristics of glassy behaviour. There is a slowing down of the dynamics and a limiting value of the retarded spatial correlations. Motivated by the success of mode-coupling theories for hard spheres and discs in reproducing experimental results in classical fluids, we use the Mori formalism within a mode-coupling theory to obtain semi-quantitative insight into the role of electron correlations as they affect the time response of the weakly disordered 2D electron system at low densities.