The spatial distribution of negatively charged Zn dopant atoms in GaAs has
been investigated by cross-sectional scanning tunneling microscopy. At high
densities, the dopant atoms exhibit clear clustering behavior, suggesting
the existence of an effective attractive interaction in addition to the scr
eened Coulomb repulsion between two dopants. By analyzing the data through
Monte Carlo simulations, we have extracted the intrinsic screening length a
t different dopant densities and attributed the origin of the effective att
raction to strong many-body effects in the dopant-dopant repulsion.