Competition between Mott and Anderson metal-insulator transitions is studied in a one dimensional spinless fermion system of 200 sites. Although the long range charge density wave (CDW) order and gap of the Mott phase are destroyed by weak randomness, the elementary excitations are still solitons based on the local CDW order. The solitons are easily localized in the random potential. Thus for weak randomness and large interaction, a disordered Mott phase exists in which the localization is determined by the local CDW order in contrast to the conventional Anderson localization picture in the weak interaction limit.

• Received 27 July 1993

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.71.4377