In this paper, we present a unified physical picture for the electrostatic attraction between two coupled planar Wigner crystals at finite (but below their melting) temperature. At very low temperatures, we find a new regime where the attraction, arising from the long-wavelength excitation of the plasmon mode, scales with the interplanar distance $d$ as $d^{ -2}$. At higher temperatures, our calculation agrees with known results. Furthermore, we analyze the temperature dependence of the short-ranged attraction arising from ``structural'' correlations and argue that thermal fluctuations drastically reduce the strength of this attraction.
Categories: cond-mat.soft cond-mat.mtrl-sci cond-mat.stat-mech