Coulomb Glass: a Mean Field Study

We study the Coulomb glass model of disordered localized electrons with long-range Coulomb interaction, which describes systems such as disordered insulators, granular metals, amorphous semiconductors, or doped crystalline semiconductors. Long ago Efros and Shklovskii showed that the long-range repulsion induces a soft Coulomb gap in the single particle density of states at low temperatures. Recent works suggested that this gap is associated to a transition to a glass phase, similar to the Almeida-Thouless transition in spin glasses. In this work, we use a mean field approach to characterize several physical properties of the Coulomb glass. In particular, following a seminal work of Bray and Moore, we show that the Edward-Anderson parameter $q_{EA}$ and the spin glass susceptibility $\chi_{SG}$ are directly related to spectrum distribution of the Hessian matrix around free energy minima. Using this result, we show that no glass transition is associated to the gap formation.