When two 2D electron gas layers, each at Landau level filling factor $ u=1/2$, are close together a condensate of interlayer excitons emerges at low temperature. Although the excitonic phase is qualitatively well understood, the incoherent phase just above the critical layer separation is not. Using a combination of interlayer tunneling spectroscopy and conventional transport, we explore the incoherent phase in samples both near the phase boundary and further from it. In the more closely spaced bilayers we find the electronic spectral functions narrower and the Fermi energy of the $ u = 1/2$ composite fermion metal smaller than in the more widely separated bilayers. We attribute these effects to a softening of the intralayer Coulomb interaction due to interlayer screening.
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