# 1 Introduction

## 1 Introduction

After four decades of research the transport properties of systems in which both disorder and strong interactions are equally important are still not even qualitatively understood. Based on Andersons seminal paper  investigations of non-interacting disordered electrons led to the development of the scaling theory of localization . In the absence of external symmetry breaking it predicts that all states are localized in one and two dimensions. In contrast, in three dimensions states are extended for weak disorder while they are localized for sufficiently strong disorder. This gives rise to a disorder-driven metal-insulator transition (MIT) at a certain value of disorder strength.

Later also the influence of electron-electron interactions on the transport properties of disordered electrons was investigated intensively by means of many-body perturbation theory, field theory, and the renormalization group . This led to a qualitative analysis of the MIT and the identification of the different universality classes. The topic has reattracted a lot of attention after unexpected experimental  and theoretical  findings. In order to investigate the localized phase and to check the validity of the perturbative results it seems to be important to investigate the problem of interacting disordered electrons non-perturbatively. One possible way in this direction is numerical simulations although they are very costly for disordered many-body systems. Recently, we have developed the Hartree-Fock based diagonalization (HFD) method  for the simulation of disordered quantum many-particle systems. We have already applied this very efficient method for calculating the transport properties of one-dimensional  and two-dimensional  disordered interacting electrons. In this paper we extend the investigation to three spatial dimensions.

## 2 Model and calculations

The model, called the quantum Coulomb glass model , is defined on a cubic lattice of $`L^3`$ sites occupied by $`N=KL^3`$ electrons ($`0<K<1`$). To ensure charge neutrality each lattice site carries a compensating positive charge of $`Ke`$. The Hamiltonian is given by

$$H=t\underset{ij}{}(c_i^{}c_j+c_j^{}c_i)+\underset{i}{}\phi _in_i+\frac{1}{2}\underset{ij}{}(n_iK)(n_jK)U_{ij}$$
(1)   
where $`c_i^{}`$ and $`c_i`$ are the electron creation and annihilation operators at site $`i`$, respectively, and $`ij`$ denotes all pairs of nearest neighbor sites. $`t`$ gives the strength of the hopping term and $`n_i`$ is the occupation number of site $`i`$. For a correct description of the insulating phase the Coulomb interaction between the electrons is kept long-ranged, $`U_{ij}=U/r_{ij}`$ ($`r_{ij}`$ is measured in units of the lattice constant), since screening breaks down in the insulator. The random potential values $`\phi _i`$ are chosen independently from a box distribution of width $`2W`$ and zero mean. (In the following we always set $`W=1`$.) Two important limiting cases of the quantum Coulomb glass are the Anderson model of localization (for $`U_{ij}=0`$) and the classical Coulomb glass (for $`t=0`$). For the present study we have simulated systems with $`3^3`$ sites and 13 electrons using periodic boundary conditions.

The calculations are carried out by means of the HFD method . This method which is based on the idea of the configuration interaction approach  adapted to disordered lattice models is very efficient in calculating low-energy properties in any spatial dimension and for short-range as well as long-range interactions. It consists of 3 steps: (i) solve the Hartree-Fock (HF) approximation of the Hamiltonian, (ii) use a Monte-Carlo algorithm to find the low-energy many-particle HF states, (iii) diagonalize the Hamiltonian in the basis formed by these states. The efficiency of the HFD method is due to the fact that the HF basis states are comparatively close in character to the exact eigenstates in the entire parameter space. Thus it is sufficient to keep only a small fraction of the Hilbert space in order to obtain low-energy quantities with an accuracy comparable to that of exact diagonalization. For the present systems of 13 electrons on 27 sites we found it sufficient to keep 500 to 1000 (out of $`210^8`$) basis states.

In order to calculate the conductance we employ the Kubo-Greenwood formula  which connects the conductance with the current-current correlation function in the ground state. Using the spectral representation of the correlation function the real (dissipative) part of the conductance (in units of the conductance quantum $`e^2/h`$) is obtained as

$$ReG^{xx}(\omega )=\frac{2\pi ^2L}{\omega }\underset{\nu }{}|0|j^x|\nu |^2\delta (\omega +E_0E_\nu )$$
(2)   
where $`j^x`$ is the $`x`$ component of the current operator and $`\nu `$ denotes the eigenstates of the Hamiltonian. The finite life time $`\tau `$ of the eigenstates in a real d.c. transport experiment (where the system is not isolated but connected to contacts and leads) results in an inhomogeneous broadening $`\gamma =1/\tau `$ of the $`\delta `$ functions in the Kubo-Greenwood formula . Here we use $`\gamma =0.05`$ which is of the order of the single-particle level spacing. Since the resulting conductances vary strongly from sample to sample we logarithmically average all results over several disorder configurations.

## 3 Results

We now present results on the dependence of the conductance on the interaction strength. In Fig. 1 we show the conductance as a function of frequency for two sets of parameters. The data represent logarithmic averages over 400 disorder configurations. In the lower diagram the kinetic energy is very small ($`t=0.03`$), i.e., the system is in the highly localized regime. Here not too strong Coulomb interactions ($`U=0.5,1.0`$) lead to an increase of the conductance at low frequencies. If the interaction becomes stronger ($`U=2`$) the conductance finally decreases again. The behavior is qualitatively different at higher kinetic energy ($`t=0.3`$) as shown in the upper diagram. Here already a weak interaction ($`U=0.5`$) leads to a reduction of the low-frequency conductance compared to non-interacting electrons. If the interaction becomes stronger ($`U=2`$) the conductance decreases further. We have carried out analogous calculations for kinetic energies $`t=0.01,\mathrm{},0.5`$ and interaction strengths $`U=0,\mathrm{},2`$. The resulting d.c. conductances are presented in Fig. 2 which is the main result of this paper. In Fig. 2 we now present results on the dependence of the d.c. conductance $`G(0)`$ on the interaction strength for kinetic energies $`t=0.01,\mathrm{},0.5`$ and interaction strength $`U=0,\mathrm{},2`$.

The data show that the influence of weak repulsive electron-electron interactions on the d.c. conductance depends on the ratio between disorder and kinetic energy. The conductance of strongly localized samples ($`t=0.01,\mathrm{},0.03`$) becomes considerably enhanced by a weak Coulomb interaction which can be understood from the suppression of localizing interferences by electron-electron scattering. With increasing kinetic energy the relative enhancement decreases as does the interaction range where the enhancement occurs. The conductance of samples with high kinetic energies ($`t0.1`$) is not enhanced by weak interactions. Sufficiently strong interactions always reduce the conductance. In this regime the main effect of the interactions is the reduction of charge fluctuations which reduces the conductance. In the limit of infinite interaction strength the system approaches a Wigner crystal/glass which is insulating for any disorder. Overall, this is the same qualitative behavior as in the cases of one  and two  spatial dimensions although the disorder induced enhancement of the conductance seems to be weaker in three dimensions. Up to now it is not clear whether this is a true dimensionality effect or due to the different linear system sizes studied. A systematic investigation of the size dependence is in progress.

To summarize, we have used the Hartree-Fock based diagonalization (HFD) method to investigate the conductance and localization properties of disordered interacting spinless electrons in three dimensions. We have found that a weak Coulomb interaction can enhance the conductivity of strongly localized samples by almost one order of magnitude, while it reduces the conductance of weakly disordered samples. If the interaction becomes stronger it eventually reduces the conductance also in the strongly localized regime.   

We acknowledge financial support by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft.