We investigate full quantum mechanical evolution of two electrons nonlinearly coupled to quantum phonons and simulate the dynamical response of the system subject to a short spatially uniform optical pulse that couples to dipole-active vibrational modes. Nonlinear electron-phonon coupling can either soften or stiffen the phonon frequency in the presence of electron density. In the former case, an external optical pulse tuned just below the phonon frequency generates attraction between electrons and leads to a long-lived bound state even after the optical pulse is switched off. It originates from a dynamical modification of the self-trapping potential that induces a metastable state. By increasing the pulse frequency, the attractive electron-electron interaction changes to repulsive. Two sequential optical pulses with different frequencies can switch between attractive and repulsive interaction. Finally, we show that the pulse-induced binding of electrons is shown to be efficient also for weakly dispersive optical phonons, in the presence anharmonic phonon spectrum and in two dimensions.
We investigate full quantum mechanical evolution of two electrons nonlinearly coupled to quantum phonons and simulate the dynamical response of the system subject to a short spatially uniform optical pulse that couples to dipole-active vibrational modes. Nonlinear electron-phonon coupling can either soften or stiffen the phonon frequency in the presence of electron density. In the former case, an external optical pulse tuned just below the phonon frequency generates attraction between electrons and leads to a long-lived bound state even after the optical pulse is switched off. It originates from a dynamical modification of the self-trapping potential that induces a metastable state. By increasing the pulse frequency, the attractive electron-electron interaction changes to repulsive. Two sequential optical pulses with different frequencies can switch between attractive and repulsive interaction. Finally, we show that the pulse-induced binding of electrons is shown to be efficient also for weakly dispersive optical phonons, in the presence anharmonic phonon spectrum and in two dimensions.
We investigate the ground-state properties of the bipolaron coupled to quantum dispersive optical phonons in the one-dimensional Holstein-Hubbard model. We concentrate on the interplay between the phonon dispersion and the Coulomb repulsion and their mutual effect on the bipolaron effective mass, the binding energy, and the phase diagram. Most surprisingly, the sign of the curvature of the optical phonon dispersion plays a decisive role in the bipolaron binding energy in the presence of the Coulomb repulsion U. In particular, when the sign of the phonon dispersion curvature matches the sign of the electron dispersion curvature, the bipolaron remains bound in the strong-coupling limit even when $U\ensuremath{\rightarrow}\ensuremath{\infty}$ and the binding emanates from the exchange of phonons between two electrons residing on adjacent sites. At moderate electron-phonon coupling a light bipolaron exists up to large values of U. Finally, an intuitive explanation of the role of the phonon dispersion on the bipolaron binding energy is derived using the strong-coupling limit where the binding emanates from the exchange of phonons between two electrons residing on adjacent sites which leads to enhanced stability of bipolarons at elevated Coulomb repulsion.
Using an efficient variational exact diagonalization method, we computed the electron removal spectral function within the framework of the Holstein-Hubbard model containing two electrons with opposite spins coupled to dispersive quantum optical phonons. We focus on how the interplay between the electron-phonon coupling and on-site Coulomb repulsion shapes the spectral function, a quantity directly relevant to angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy (ARPES). Tuning the strengths of the electron-phonon coupling and the Hubbard interaction allows us to examine the evolution of the spectral properties of the system as it crosses over from a bound bipolaron to separate polarons. We find that phonon dispersion plays an important role: It substantially redistributes the spectral weight across the low- and the high-energy features and controls the emergence and the structure of distinct multiphonon continua. In regimes of strong electron-phonon coupling and low Coulomb repulsion, the spectral function exhibits a broad distribution reflecting bound bipolaronic states. Increasing the Coulomb repulsion weakens bipolaron binding, shifts the primary quasiparticle peak closer to polaronic behavior and confines the spectral weight near the Brillouin-zone center. Our results provide a framework for interpreting ARPES measurements in systems where phonon–mediated attraction competes with direct Coulomb repulsion.
The non-equilibrium dynamics of matter excited by light may produce electronic phases, such as laser-induced high-transition-temperature superconductivity, that do not exist in equilibrium. Here we simulate the dynamics of a metal driven at initial time by a spatially uniform pump that excites dipole-active vibrational modes which couple nonlinearly to electrons. We provide evidence for rapid loss of spatial coherence, leading to emergent effective disorder in the dynamics, which arises in a system unitarily evolving under a translation-invariant Hamiltonian, and dominates the electronic behavior as the system evolves towards a correlated electron-phonon long-time state, possibly explaining why transient superconductivity is not observed. Our framework provides a basis within which to understand correlation dynamics in current pump-probe experiments of vibrationally coupled electrons, highlight the importance of the evolution of phase coherence, and demonstrate that pumped electron-phonon systems provide a means of realizing dynamically induced disorder in translation-invariant systems.
This thesis investigates how bosonic environments reshape electronic correlations in quantum many-body systems, with emphasis on two complementary classes of mediators: lattice vibrations and quantized electromagnetic modes. The central question is how such bosonic degrees of freedom renormalize electronic motion, generate effective interactions, and open routes toward controlling correlated states. The first part of the thesis focuses on phonon-mediated correlations in the Holstein–Hubbard model. We study how dispersive optical phonons modify bipolaron binding, mobility, and single-particle spectra. We show that phonon dispersion can substantially reshape both the stability of bound pairs and their spectroscopic fingerprints. We further demonstrate that electron-removal spectra can already contain clear signatures of preformed pairs: a liquid of incoherent bipolarons exhibits a depletion of low-energy spectral weight near the chemical potential while remaining metallic, and its spectra can be understood in terms of a simple Bose-sea picture of hard-core pairs. The second part addresses nonequilibrium control of phonon-mediated interactions. For a system with nonlinear electron–phonon coupling driven by a short optical pulse, numerically exact time evolution reveals that phonon driving can switch the effective electron–electron interaction between attraction and repulsion. In the oscillator-softening regime, the pulse can create a long-lived metastable bound state that persists after the field is turned off, reflecting a configuration-selective redistribution of phonon excitations rather than a purely Floquet mechanism. The final part turns to photon-mediated correlations in structured electromagnetic environments. Within extended dynamical mean-field theory, we study a system in which intrinsic static interactions coexist with retarded photon-mediated couplings. The results reveal a superradiant-like ordered phase driven by the softening of a collective polaritonic mode and show that static interactions can assist the emergence of this order. Taken together, the thesis highlights bosons not only as mediators of correlations, but also can serve as a tool for controlling correlated electronic behavior.
When dressed particles (polarons) exchange quantum phonons, the resulting interactions are generally attractive. If the particles have hard-core statistics and the coupling to phonons is through the kinetic energy terms, phonon-mediated interactions are repulsive. Here, we show that such repulsive phonon-mediated interactions bind dressed particles into bipolarons with unique properties. These bipolaron states appear in the gap between phonon excitations, above the two-polaron continuum. While thermodynamically unstable, the bipolaron is protected by energy and momentum conservation and represents a quasiparticle with a large dispersion and a negative effective mass near zero momentum. We discuss possible experimental implementation of the conditions for the formation of such repulsively bound bipolarons.
We investigate an exact nonequilibrium solution of a two-site electron-phonon model, where an infrared-active phonon that is nonlinearly coupled to the electrons is driven by a laser field. The time-resolved electronic spectrum shows coherence-incoherence spectral weight transfer, a clear signature of light-enhanced electron-phonon coupling. The present study is motivated by recent evidence for enhanced electron-phonon coupling in pump-probe terahertz and angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy in bilayer graphene when driven near resonance with an infrared-active phonon mode [E. Pomarico et al., Phys. Rev. B 95, 024304 (2017)], and by a theoretical study suggesting that transient electronic attraction arises from nonlinear electron-phonon coupling [D. M. Kennes et al., Nat. Phys. 13, 479 (2017)]. We show that a linear scaling of light-enhanced electron-phonon coupling with the pump field intensity emerges, in accordance with a time-nonlocal self-energy based on a mean-field decoupling using quasiclassical phonon coherent states. Finally, we demonstrate that this leads to enhanced double occupancies in accordance with an effective electron-electron attraction. Our results suggest that materials with strong phonon nonlinearities provide an ideal playground to achieve light-enhanced electron-phonon coupling and possibly light-induced superconductivity.