We establish the connection between the presence of a glass phase and the appearance of a Coulomb gap in disordered materials with strongly interacting electrons. Treating multiparticle correlations in a systematic way, we show that in the case of strong disorder a continuous glass transition takes place whose Landau expansion is identical to that of the Sherrington-Kirkpatrick spin glass. We show that the marginal stability of the glass phase controls the physics of these systems: it results in slow dynamics and leads to the formation of a Coulomb gap.

• Received 28 May 2004

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.93.256403