We consider the temperature-induced melting of a Wigner solid in one-dimensional (1D) and two-dimensional (2D) lattices of electrons interacting via the long-range Coulomb interaction in the presence of strong disorder arising from charged impurities in the system. The system simulates semiconductor-based 2D electron layers where Wigner crystallization is often claimed to be observed experimentally. Using exact diagonalization and utilizing the inverse participation ratio as well as conductance to distinguish between the localized insulating solid phase and the extended metallic liquid phase, we find that the effective melting temperature may be strongly enhanced by disorder since the disordered crystal typically could be in a localized glassy state incorporating the combined nonperturbative physics of both Anderson localization and Wigner crystallization. This disorder-induced enhancement of the melting temperature may explain why experiments often manage to observe insulating disorder-pinned Wigner solids in spite of the experimental temperature being decisively far above the theoretical melting temperature of the pristine Wigner crystal phase in many cases.
We study the quantum phase diagram of a system of hard-core bosons on the kagome lattice with nearest-neighbor repulsive interactions, for arbitrary densities, by means of the hierarchical mean-field theory and exact diagonalization techniques. This system is isomorphic to the spin
S=1/2 XXZ model in presence of an external magnetic field, a paradigmatic example of frustrated quantum magnetism. In the nonfrustrated regime, we find two crystal phases at densities 1/3 and 2/3 that melt into a superfluid phase when increasing the hopping amplitude, in semiquantitative agreement with quantum Monte Carlo computations. In the frustrated regime and away from half-filling, we find a series of plateaux with densities commensurate with powers of 1/3. The broader density plateaux (at densities 1/3 and 2/3) are remnants of the classical degeneracy in the Ising limit. For densities near half-filling, this staircase of crystal phases melts into a superfluid, which displays finite chiral currents when computed with clusters having an odd number of sites. Both the staircase of crystal phases and the superfluid phase prevail in the noninteracting limit, suggesting that the lowest dispersionless single-particle band may be at the root of this phenomenon.