Long time relaxation of interacting electrons in the regime of hopping conduction

Abstract

Using numerical simulations we studied the long time relaxation of the hopping conductivity. Even though no modern computation is able to simulate the behavior of a large size system over minutes or hours so as to observe the relaxation, still we have been able to show that the long time relaxation and aging effect observed in experiments can be explained in terms of slow transitions between different pseudoground states. This was achieved by showing that different pseudoground states may have different conductivities and that the dispersion of conductivities is in agreement with the experimental data. We considered two different two-dimensional models with electron-electron interaction: the lattice model and the random site model, corresponding to ``strong'' and ``weak'' effective disorder. For the lattice model, effectively strong disorder, we have shown that the universality of the Coulomb gap, which is responsible for the universal Efros-Shklovskii law for the conductivity, suppresses the long time relaxation of conductivity since the universality strongly decreases the dispersion of conductivities of the pseudoground states.