The ground state and finite-temperature properties of polarons are studied considering a two-site and a four-site Holstein model by exact diagonalization of the Hamiltonian. The kinetic energy, Drude weight, correlation functions involving charge and lattice deformations, and the specific heat have been evaluated as a function of electron–phonon (e–ph) coupling strength and temperature. The effects of site diagonal disorder on the above properties have been investigated. The disorder is found to suppress the kinetic energy and the Drude weight, and reduces the spatial extension of the polaron. Increasing temperature also reduces the kinetic energy, Drude weight and the polaron size when the e–ph interaction is weak or intermediate. For strong coupling the effect of temperature is small but opposite. For sufficiently strong coupling the kinetic energy arises mainly from the incoherent hopping processes owing to the motion of electrons within the polaron and is almost independent of the disorder strength. The specific heat shows a peak in the intermediate range of coupling, and the peak is suppressed in the presence of disorder. From the coherent and incoherent contributions to the kinetic energy, the temperature above which the incoherent part dominates is determined as a function of e–ph coupling strength.
The ground state and finite-temperature properties of polarons are studied considering a two-site and a four-site Holstein model by exact diagonalization of the Hamiltonian. The kinetic energy, Drude weight, correlation functions involving charge and lattice deformations, and the specific heat have been evaluated as a function of electron–phonon (e–ph) coupling strength and temperature. The effects of site diagonal disorder on the above properties have been investigated. The disorder is found to suppress the kinetic energy and the Drude weight, and reduces the spatial extension of the polaron. Increasing temperature also reduces the kinetic energy, Drude weight and the polaron size when the e–ph interaction is weak or intermediate. For strong coupling the effect of temperature is small but opposite. For sufficiently strong coupling the kinetic energy arises mainly from the incoherent hopping processes owing to the motion of electrons within the polaron and is almost independent of the disorder strength. The specific heat shows a peak in the intermediate range of coupling, and the peak is suppressed in the presence of disorder. From the coherent and incoherent contributions to the kinetic energy, the temperature above which the incoherent part dominates is determined as a function of e–ph coupling strength.
As ones know,the polaron is a quasiparticle formed by an electron and phonons.Due to Coulomb interaction,the electron will make the lattice deformation take place,meanwhile,the deformation potential(induced) by the lattice deformation will exert on the electron,the electron-phonon interaction influence doubtless on the state of motion of an electron,for example,the energy band and effective mass of an electron could change by the interaction,the electron can also be trapped by the deformable lattice,therefore,the research on the(polaron) is very important in understanding optical and transport properties of a solid. Studying electron-phonon interaction has been a main subject in condensed matter physics;in experiments,the influences of the temperature on the forbidden-band width of semiconductors have been observed very early,with the increase of the temperature,the forbidden-band width of most semiconductors will narrow,but a few will widen,these situations are closely relevant to the electron-phonon interaction.In particular,(recently),a large amount of experimental results,ranging from infrared spectroscopy to transport properties(involving) the colossal magnetoresistance and high-T_c superconductivity,has pointed out the importance of the electron-phonon interaction,which has renewed the interest in studying the models of the electron-phonon(coupled) system,especially,the Holstein polaron,for its relative simplicity,is the most considered model for the interaction of a single tight-binding electron coupled to phonons. In the past several decades,the Holstein poloron has been studied in detail in one-dimensional lattices,various theoretical methods,such as variational approaches,the Global-Local variational method,the(coherent)-state expansion method,have been developed to study features of the Holstein polaron including ground-state energy,polaron energy band,effective mass and so on.However,so far,the work considering the influences of the temperature on features of the Holstein polaron is little still. The main aim of this paper is to investigate the influences of the temperature on the energy-band width and the effective mass of the Holstein polaron by using the canonical transformation method.It is shown that,at certain coupling strength,the energy-band width of the Holstein polaron will narrow and the effective mass will augment with the increase of the temperature,in particular,when electron-phonon coupling strength is big enough,the energy-band width will become zero rapidly in small region of temperature,in fact,the situation is rapid transition of the polaron from the energy-band state to the self-trapping local state,this is an(interesting) result obtained in the paper.It is obvious that these features of the Holstein polaron are very useful in explaining optical and transport properties of a solid.
We study the small-polaron problem of a single electron interacting with the lattice for the Holstein model in the adiabatic limit on a comb lattice hen the electron-phonon interaction acts only on the base sites. The ground state properties can be easily deduced from the ones of a linear chain with a appropriate rescaling of the coupling constant. On the other hand, the dynamical properties, that involve the complete spectrum of the system, present an "exotic" behavior. In the weak coupling limit the Drude weight (zero-frequency-conductivity) is enhanced with respect to its free-case value, contrary to the linear chain case, where for every finite value one has suppression of the Drude peak. More interestingly, the loss of coherent electron motion and the polaronic localization of the carrier occurs for different coupling values. Thus for intermediate coupling, a different phase appears with large kinetic energy and no coherent motion. RI Capone, Massimo/A-7762-2008
Employing a largely unbiased variational exact diagonalization technique, we analyze the consequences of longer-ranged electron hopping and electron-phonon interaction on polaron formation in one dimension. Having at our disposal the accurate ground-state energy and wave function, we calculate and discuss various physical quantities, such as the renormalized band structure, effective mass, wave-function renormalization factor, phonon dressing, and Drude weight, characterizing the properties of the polaronic quasiparticle. We demonstrate that the electron-phonon coupling affects the relative strength of the nearest neighbor (NN) and next nearest neighbor (NNN) hopping processes in a dynamic way. Most notably we observe that the minimum of the polaron band, occurring at a finite momentum for large negative ratio between NN and NNN transfer, jumps to zero momentum as the electron-phonon coupling exceeds a critical one, thereby causing a rather sharp polaron transition in the one-dimensional extended Holstein model. The signatures of this transition are seen in the effective mass and polaron mobility, and therefore should be easily detectable by transport measurements.
We provide a comprehensive solution to the lattice dynamics problem in the two dimensional Holstein model at finite electron density and finite temperature. We work in the physically relevant adiabatic regime and vary the electron-phonon interaction from the weak coupling perturbative window to the strong coupling polaronic regime. We explore three typical electron densities, dilute - where spatial correlations between polarons is weak, intermediate - where correlations are significant, and half-filling - where there is long range checkerboard order at low temperature. We use two methods both of which exploit the "slowness" of the phonons to handle the problem. These are (i)~a standard random phase approximation (RPA), adapted to capture small quantum fluctuations on Monte Carlo generated classical thermal backgrounds, and (ii)~a Langevin dynamics scheme, with a simplified ``thermal noise'', that can address large amplitude dynamical fluctuations. The Langevin scheme, as we argue in the paper, is the superior method in the strong coupling part of the phase diagram, where lattice distortions are large. It reveals a non trivial multi-peak momentum resolved spectrum with a high energy part, on the scale of the bare phonon frequency Ω, and a low energy peak at ω≪Ω. Below the polaronic threshold, the high energy dispersion changes only modestly with temperature T, while the broadening, arising from mode coupling, increases linearly with T at low temperature. The low energy peak shows up at strong coupling and finite temperature and arises from the slow tunneling of polarons. The tunneling events become spatially correlated as electron density increases towards half-filling, and the weight becomes strongly momentum and temperature dependent. We suggest the analytic basis of these results.
The polaron features due to electron-phonon interactions with different coupling ranges are investigated by adopting a variational approach. The ground-state energy, the spectral weight, the average kinetic energy, the mean number of phonons, and the electron-lattice correlation function are discussed for the system with coupling to local and nearest-neighbor lattice displacements comparing the results with the long-range case. For large values of the coupling with nearest-neighbor sites, most physical quantities show a strong resemblance with those obtained for the long-range electron-phonon interaction. Moreover, for intermediate values of interaction strength, the correlation function between electron and nearest-neighbor lattice displacements is characterized by an upturn as function of the electron-phonon coupling constant.
We investigate the orbital effects of a strong external magnetic field on the ground-state properties of a two-dimensional (2D) Holstein polaron, employing variational approaches based on exact diagonalization. From the ground-state energy and the wave function, we calculate the electron-phonon correlation function, the average phonon number, and the Drude weight and investigate the evolution of a 2D Holstein polaron as a function of the magnetic flux. Although the external magnetic field affects the polaron throughout the parameter regime, we show that the magnetic field has a stronger effect on a loosely bound (spatially extended) polaron. We also find that the magnetic field can be used as a tuning parameter, particularly for a weakly coupled polaron, to reduce the spatial extent of a large polaron.