Freezing of Strongly Correlated Electrons in Bilayer Systems with Weak Disorder

We investigate a freezing transition of strongly correlated electrons in coupled two-dimensional layers in the presence of small levels of disorder. When the layers are far apart the ground state of the system is the liquid phase. We find at a critical layer spacing that a transition occurs to a coupled glassy phase. The driving mechanism for this is the interaction between electrons in the two layers. This acts on a given electron like an external disorder potential which enhances the effect of the disorder already existing in the layer backgrounds. The nonergodicity parameters for the electrons are calculated within a mode coupling formalism. Strong electron-electron correlations are essential for the transition to occur.