  We consider 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.
