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arXiv:2502.13005

Bipolaron dynamics in the one-dimensional SSH model

Filip Marijanović, Yi-Fan Qu, Eugene Demler

Published Feb 18, 2025• 0 citations

Abstract

Characterizing bipolaron binding, and understanding how it depends on electron-phonon interaction, is crucial to unraveling the nature of emergent many-body states in strongly interacting electron-phonon systems. So far, most studies of bipolarons have been limited to the Holstein model, in which the coupling constant is momentum-independent. The paradigmatic example of momentum-dependent electron-phonon interaction comes from the system in which phonon distortions modify electron hopping, the SSH model. Already individual polarons in the SSH model are richer than the Holstein model counterparts, and feature a phase transition into the finite momentum ground state with increasing electron-phonon interaction. In this paper, we use a variational approach to study bipolarons in the one-dimensional SSH model and discuss their ground state, dispersion, and excitation spectra. We explore the full parameter range of the system, including the adiabatic regime of slow phonons, which was inaccessible to previous theoretical studies. In agreement with earlier studies, we find that in the anti-adiabatic strongly interacting regime, bipolarons have low effective mass. By contrast, in the adiabatic case, we find that increasing electron-phonon interactions results in an exponential increase of the bipolaron mass. We establish the existence of multiple branches of bound excited states of SSH bipolaron and discuss the signatures of these bound states in dynamics. We show that in the anti-adiabatic regime, response functions obey a parity selection rule, that imposes symmetry constraints on the excitation spectra and provides a clear signature of SSH bipolarons.

DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2502.13005

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Characterizing bipolaron binding, and understanding how it depends on electron-phonon interaction, is crucial to unraveling the nature of emergent many-body states in strongly interacting electron-phonon systems. So far, most studies of bipolarons have been limited to the Holstein model, in which the coupling constant is momentum-independent. The paradigmatic example of momentum-dependent electron-phonon interaction comes from the system in which phonon distortions modify electron hopping, the SSH model. Already individual polarons in the SSH model are richer than the Holstein model counterparts, and feature a phase transition into the finite momentum ground state with increasing electron-phonon interaction. In this paper, we use a variational approach to study bipolarons in the one-dimensional SSH model and discuss their ground state, dispersion, and excitation spectra. We explore the full parameter range of the system, including the adiabatic regime of slow phonons, which was inaccessible to previous theoretical studies. In agreement with earlier studies, we find that in the anti-adiabatic strongly interacting regime, bipolarons have low effective mass. By contrast, in the adiabatic case, we find that increasing electron-phonon interactions results in an exponential increase of the bipolaron mass. We establish the existence of multiple branches of bound excited states of SSH bipolaron and discuss the signatures of these bound states in dynamics. We show that in the anti-adiabatic regime, response functions obey a parity selection rule, that imposes symmetry constraints on the excitation spectra and provides a clear signature of SSH bipolarons.

Polarons with different types of electron-phonon coupling have fundamentally different properties. When the dominant interaction is between the electron density and lattice displacement, the momentum of the ground state does not change and the polaron gets exponentially heavy at strong coupling. In contrast, one-dimensional Peierls/Su-Schrieffer-Heeger (PSSH) polarons with interaction originating from displacement-modulated hopping feature a shift of the ground-state momentum to finite values and moderate values of effective mass as coupling is increased [D. J. J. Marchand et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 105, 266605 (2010)]. Based on Diagrammatic Monte Carlo method, we investigate whether unusual properties of PSSH polarons depend on the type of the displacement-modulated hopping and to what degree they survive in higher dimension. We study two different PSSH models: with bosonic degrees of freedom residing on sites (model A) and bonds (model B) of the two-dimensional square lattice. For model A, we find that in both adiabatic and intermediate regimes, the momentum of the ground state experiences a continuous transition from zero to a finite value as a function of coupling strength. The transition is driven by quadratic instability of the dispersion function, implying that effective mass diverges at the critical point, and then decreases in an anisotropic fashion with increasing coupling. Unexpectedly, for model B, the momentum of the ground state always stays at zero and the effective mass increases monotonously with coupling. The increase is far from exponential and tends to level off at strong interaction, resulting in relatively light polarons. Having light polarons in the strong coupling regime is crucial for the bipolaron mechanism of high-temperature superconductivity [J. Sous, M. Chakraborty, R. V. Krems, and M. Berciu, Phys. Rev. Lett. 121, 247001 (2018).]

We analyze the transition temperature

{T}_{c}

of bipolaronic superconductivity in a bond Su-Schrieffer-Heeger (bond-SSH) model---also known as a bond Peierls model---where bond phonons modulate the electron hoppings. Using a semiclassical instanton approximation justifiable in the adiabatic limit of slow phonons, we find that the bipolaron mass is only weakly enhanced in contrast to the typically large mass enhancement found in models where the phonons couple to electron density. Strikingly, in the ``atomic'' limit, we find a bond bipolaron can freely slide within a continuously degenerate energy manifold, explaining the origin of the weak mass enhancement in the strong coupling limit. A gas of these bipolarons can undergo a superfluid transition at a critical temperature for which we obtain an upper bound. This bound is exponentially larger than that in the Holstein model. Our study provides an analytical understanding of the mechanism behind the high-

{T}_{c}

bipolaronic superconductivity numerically observed in [Phys. Rev. X 13, 011010 (2023)].

The Holstein Hubbard and Holstein t-J models are studied for a wide range of phonon frequencies, electron-electron, and electron-phonon interaction strengths on finite lattices with up to ten sites by means of direct Lanczos diagonalization. Previously the necessary truncation of the phononic Hilbert space caused serious limitations to either very small systems (four or even two sites) or to weak electron-phonon coupling, in particular in the adiabatic regime. Using parallel computers we were able to investigate the transition from ``large'' to ``small'' polarons in detail. By resolving the low-lying eigenstates of the Hamiltonian and by calculating the spectral function, we can identify a polaron band in the strong-coupling case, whose dispersion deviates from the free-particle dispersion at low and intermediate phonon frequencies. For two electrons (holes) we establish the existence of bipolaronic states and discuss the formation of a bipolaron band. For the two-dimensional Holstein t-J model, we demonstrate that the formation of hole polarons is favored by strong Coulomb correlations. Analyzing hole-hole correlation functions, we find that hole binding is enhanced as a dynamical effect of the electron-phonon interaction. \textcopyright{} 1996 The American Physical Society.

We numerically and analytically calculate the properties of the bipolaron in an extended Hubbard-Holstein model, which has a longer-range electron-phonon coupling like the Fr\"ohlich model. In the strong-coupling regime, the effective mass of the bipolaron in the extended model is much smaller than the Holstein bipolaron mass. In contrast to the Holstein bipolaron, the bipolaron in the extended model has a lower binding energy and remains bound with substantial binding energy even in the large-

U

limit. In comparison with the Holstein model where only a singlet bipolaron is bound, in the extended Holstein model a triplet bipolaron can also form a bound state. We discuss the possibility of phase separation in the case of finite electron doping.

The bipolaron ground state binding energy and the effective masses are calculated self-consistently in a scheme where the electron-phonon interaction is described by the Fröhlich interaction. We explicitly use the total linear momentum conservation and both two-and three-dimensional systems are considered. We review results for binding energies and show that the bipolaron effective mass increases with the electron-phonon coupling constant α more rapidly than two free polaron masses. As expected, the increase is greater in two than in three dimensions. We estimate the screening effects due to an electronic or hole density n in a range of values such that n R 2 b ≪ 1 (here R b is the bipolaron radius). We find that the bipolaron binding energy decreases with n and eventually becomes positive indicating the existence of a metastable bipolaron state. Finally we discuss the possible connections between our results and high T c superconductivity.

In this paper we have studied the properties of a two-fermion system interacting with the phonon field in the framework of the Holstein Hubbard model in one, two and three dimensions. We have chosen the modified Lang-Firsov variational wave function with on-site and nearest-neighbour lattice distortion for the phonon subsystem to obtain an effective electronic Hamiltonian. This effective electronic Hamiltonian is then solved exactly to obtain the binding energy and effective mass of the bipolaron. We investigated the stability of the bipolaronic phase by comparing the ground-state energy of a bipolaron and two free polarons. We observed a critical repulsive on-site Hubbard interaction U c below which the bipolaronic phases are stable for a fixed electron-phonon coupling g . In the absence of on-site repulsion, bipolaronic phases are stable over the entire range of electron-phonon coupling for one dimension, whereas there is a critical electron-phonon coupling g c for formation of a stable bipolaron in two and three dimensions.