Do Interactions Increase or Reduce the Conductance of Disordered Electrons? It Depends!

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Abstract
We investigate the influence of electron-electron interactions on the conductance of two-dimensional disordered spinless electrons. We present an efficient numerical method based on diagonalization in a truncated basis of Hartree-Fock states to determine with high accuracy the low-energy properties in the entire parameter space. We find that weak interactions increase the dc conductance in the strongly localized regime while they decrease the dc conductance for weak disorder. Strong interactions always decrease the conductance. We also study the localization of single-particle excitations at the Fermi energy which turns out to be only weakly influenced by the interactions.