Bielejec E, Ruan J, Wu W
Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Rochester, Rochester, New York 14627, USA.
Phys Rev Lett. 2001 Jul 16;87(3):036801. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.87.036801. Epub 2001 Jun 26.
We report on the tunneling density of states (DOS) in strongly disordered ultrathin Be films quench condensed at 20 K. Above 5 K, the DOS shows the well-known logarithmic anomaly at the Fermi level. Only in a narrow temperature range near 2 K is the DOS linearly dependent on energy, as predicted by Efros and Shklovskii. However, both the zero-bias conductance and the slope of the linear DOS are found to decrease drastically with decreasing temperature. Tunneling measurements at mK temperatures have revealed conclusively that a hard correlation gap opens up in the DOS.