Ground-plane screening of Coulomb interactions by a nearby two-dimensional system

The use of a nearby metallic ground-plane to limit the range of the Coulomb interactions between carriers is a useful approach in studying the physics of two-dimensional (2D) systems. This approach has been used to study Wigner crystallization of electrons on the surface of liquid helium, and insulating behaviour of semiconductor two-dimensional systems. We recently reported a variation of this technique where an adjacent 2D system was used as the ground plane instead of a metal gate. In this paper, we perform calculations of the ground plane screening effect of a 2D system and show that it is as effective as a metal in screening Coulomb interactions.