Elementary excitations and avalanches in the Coulomb glass

Abstract

We study numerically the statistics of elementary excitations and charge avalanches in the classical Coulomb glass model of localized charges with unscreened Coulomb interaction and disorder. We compute the single-particle density of states with an energy minimization algorithm for systems of up to 1003 sites. The shape of the Coulomb gap is consistent with a power-law with exponent δ ≃ 2.4 and marginally consistent with exponential behavior. The results are also compared with a recently proposed self-consistent approach. We then analyze the size distribution of the charge avalanches produced by a small perturbation of the system. We show that the distribution decays as a power law in the limit of large system size, and explain this behavior in terms of the elementary excitations. Similarities and differences with the scale-free avalanches observed in mean-field spin glasses are discussed.