Ground-plane screening of Coulomb interactions in two-dimensional systems: How effectively can one two-dimensional system screen interactions in another?

Abstract

The use of a nearby metallic ground-plane to limit the range of the Coulomb interactions between carriers is a useful approach in studying the physics of two-dimensional (2D) systems. This approach has been used to study Wigner crystallization of electrons on the surface of liquid helium, and most recently, the insulating and metallic states of semiconductor-based two-dimensional systems. In this paper, we perform calculations of the screening effect of one 2D system on another and show that a 2D system is at least as effective as a metal in screening Coulomb interactions. We also show that the recent observation of the reduced effect of the ground-plane when the 2D system is in the metallic regime is due to intralayer screening.

14 pages, 7 figures Accepted in PRB

References in corpus (5)

• Metal-insulator transition in two-dimensional electron systems
• The Observation of Percolation-Induced 2D Metal-Insulator Transition in a Si MOSFET
• Thermodynamic density of states of two-dimensional GaAs systems near the apparent metal-insulator transition
• Nonlinear screening and percolative transition in a two-dimensional electron liquid
• The effect of screening long-range Coulomb interactions on the metallic behavior in two-dimensional hole systems

Cited by in corpus (7)

• Mobility engineering and metal-insulator transition in monolayer MoS2
• Composite Fermions Waltz to the Tune of a Wigner Crystal
• Critical Behavior of a Strongly Disordered 2D Electron System: The Cases of Long-Range and Screened Coulomb Interactions
• Stability of Sarma phases in density imbalanced electron-hole bilayer systems
• A simple variational method for calculating energy and quantum capacitance of an electron gas with screened interactions
• The origin of gate hysteresis in p-type Si-doped AlGaAs/GaAs heterostructures
• Screening the Coulomb interaction leads to a prethermal regime in two-dimensional bad conductors