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arXiv:2607.02136

Phonon spectral function of Holstein polaron: Investigation of many-body effects with self-energy and vertex correction

Lawrence Rai, Sudhakar Pandey

Published Jul 2, 2026• 0 citations
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Abstract

We study the impact of the many-body effects on the phonon spectral function of Holstein polaron in one-dimension in the antiadiabatic regime by incorporating the contributions from the electron self-energy and vertex corrections within a weak-coupling approach that respects the charge-conserving Ward identity. We find that while the polaronic spectral weight is suppressed due to contribution from the electron self-energy, on the other hand, the same is enhanced due to contribution from the vertex corrections. While strength of both the contributions increases with increasing the wave vector ($\q$) of phonons, they nearly cancel each other for the small-$\q$ modes so that the polaronic spectral weight is weakly affected due to the many-body effects. For the large-$\q$ modes near the zone boundary, the net many-body correction is dominated by the contribution of the electron self-energy which increases faster in comparison to that of the vertex corrections with increasing the wave vector thereby resulting in a significant suppression of the polaronic spectral weight. We find that while the weak-coupling perturbative approach provides a reliable estimation of the impact of the many-body effects deep inside the antiadibatic regime, the renormalization of quasiparticle spectrum must be taken into account for an accurate estimation when the phonon energy approaches the electronic bandwidth.

DOI
10.48550/arxiv.2607.02136

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We study the impact of the many-body effects on the phonon spectral function of Holstein polaron in one-dimension in the antiadiabatic regime by incorporating the contributions from the electron self-energy and vertex corrections within a weak-coupling approach that respects the charge-conserving Ward identity. We find that while the polaronic spectral weight is suppressed due to contribution from the electron self-energy, on the other hand, the same is enhanced due to contribution from the vertex corrections. While strength of both the contributions increases with increasing the wave vector (\q\q\q) of phonons, they nearly cancel each other for the small-\q\q\q modes so that the polaronic spectral weight is weakly affected due to the many-body effects. For the large-\q\q\q modes near the zone boundary, the net many-body correction is dominated by the contribution of the electron self-energy which increases faster in comparison to that of the vertex corrections with increasing the wave vector thereby resulting in a significant suppression of the polaronic spectral weight. We find that while the weak-coupling perturbative approach provides a reliable estimation of the impact of the many-body effects deep inside the antiadibatic regime, the renormalization of quasiparticle spectrum must be taken into account for an accurate estimation when the phonon energy approaches the electronic bandwidth.
The phonon spectral function of the one-dimensional Holstein model is obtained within weak and strong-coupling approximations based on analytical self-energy calculations.The characteristic excitations found in the limit of small charge-carrier density are related to the known (electronic) spectral properties of Holstein polarons such as the polaron band dispersion.Particular emphasis is laid on the different physics occurring in the adiabatic and antiadiabatic regimes, respectively.Comparison is made with a cluster approach exploiting exact numerical results on small systems to yield an approximation for the thermodynamic limit.This method, similar to cluster perturbation theory, confirms the analytical findings, and yields accurate results also in the intermediate-coupling regime.
We propose an approach for investigating the many-body effects on the phonon spectrum in an electron-phonon coupled system by taking into account the electron self-energy and vertex corrections which respect the Ward identity representing the conservation of electronic charge. Our approach provides a systematic diagrammatic expansion of the phonon self-energy ${\mathrm{\ensuremath{\Pi}}}_{\mathbf{q}}(\ensuremath{\omega})$ in powers of the electron-phonon scattering strength squared (g2)({g}^{2})(g2). In this approach the many-body corrections to the phonon spectrum vanish identically for the q=0\mathbf{q}=0q=0 mode due to an exact cancellation between the contributions arising from electron self-energy and vertex corrections. This cancellation holds irrespective of the microscopic details of the system such as dimensionality, adiabaticity, strength of electron-phonon scattering, etc. Our results demonstrate that the contributions of electron self-energy and vertex corrections are not only comparable but they also tend to cancel each other so that the phonon spectrum remains nearly unaffected due to many-body effects in the regime of long-wavelength excitations ($\mathbf{q}\ensuremath{\rightarrow}0$). Our results provide another constraint for the applicability of the Migdal theorem.
The phonon spectral function of the one-dimensional Holstein model is obtained within weak and strong-coupling approximations based on analytical self-energy calculations. The characteristic excitations found in the limit of small charge-carrier density are related to the known (electronic) spectral properties of Holstein polarons such as the polaron band dispersion. Particular emphasis is laid on the different physics occurring in the adiabatic and anti-adiabatic regimes, respectively. Comparison is made with a cluster approach exploiting exact numerical results on small systems to yield an approximation for the thermodynamic limit. This method, similar to cluster perturbation theory, confirms the analytical findings, and yields accurate results also in the intermediate-coupling regime.
We calculate the spectral properties of the one-dimensional Holstein and breathing polarons using the self-consistent Born approximation. The Holstein model electron-phonon coupling is momentum independent while the breathing coupling increases monotonically with the phonon momentum. We find that for a linear or tight binding electron dispersion: (i) for the same value of the dimensionless coupling the quasiparticle renormalization at small momentum in the breathing polaron is much smaller, (ii) the quasiparticle renormalization at small momentum in the breathing polaron increases with phonon frequency unlike in the Holstein model where it decreases, and (iii) in the Holstein model the quasiparticle dispersion displays a kink and a small gap at an excitation energy equal to the phonon frequency ${\ensuremath{\omega}}_{0}$ while in the breathing model it displays two gaps, one at excitation energy ${\ensuremath{\omega}}_{0}$ and another one at $2{\ensuremath{\omega}}_{0}$. These differences have two reasons: first, the momentum of the relevant scattered phonons increases with increasing polaron momentum and second, the breathing bare coupling is an increasing function of the phonon momentum. These result in an effective electron-phonon coupling for the breathing model which is an increasing function of the total polaron momentum, such that the small momentum polaron is in the weak coupling regime while the large momentum one is in the strong coupling regime. However, the first reason does not hold if the free electron dispersion has low energy states separated by large momentum, as in a higher dimensional system, for example, in this situation the difference between the two models becomes less significant.
We compute the Holstein polaron spectral function on a one-dimensional ring using the finite-temperature TTT Lanczos method. With increasing TTT additional features in the spectral function emerge even at temperatures below the phonon frequency. We observe a substantial spread of the spectral weight towards lower frequencies and the broadening of the quasiparticle (QP) peak. In the weak-coupling regime the QP peak merges with the continuum in the high-TTT limit. In the strong-coupling regime the main features of the low-TTT spectral function remain detectable up to the highest TTT used in our calculations. The effective polaron mass shows a nonmonotonic behavior as a function of TTT at small phonon frequency but increases with TTT at larger frequencies. The self-energy remains kkk independent even at elevated TTT in the frequency range corresponding to the polaron band, while at higher frequencies it develops a distinguishable kkk dependence. Analytical expressions for the first few frequency moments are derived, and they agree well with those extracted from numerical calculations in a wide-TTT regime.
We use the density matrix renormalization group (DMRG) to compute the phonon spectral function of a one-dimensional spinless Holstein model doped with a low but finite carrier concentration, x≤0.15x \leq 0.15x≤0.15, as a function of the electron-phonon coupling λλλ. To the best of our knowledge, these are the first such results in this regime, complementing extensive prior work at the single-polaron level (x→0x\to 0x→0). We find that significant phonon spectral weight is transferred both below, all the way down to ω=0ω=0ω=0, and above the bare phonon energy ΩΩΩ, in stark contrast with the Kohn-anomaly phenomenology expected in the Migdal limit, where weight remains centered near ΩΩΩ with a kink at q=2kFq=2k_Fq=2kF​. No signature of this 2kF2k_F2kF​ kink appears in our results. This behavior is captured qualitatively by the Random Phase Approximation (RPA), and semi-quantitatively, at negligible extra computational cost, by a ``dressed RPA'' scheme in which the electron addition propagator is renormalized using the Momentum Average (MA) approximation for the low-density electron-polaron. By contrast, adding the lowest-order vertex correction to this dressed scheme produces unphysical negative spectral weight, signaling that vertex and propagator dressings must be treated consistently once the propagators are dressed nonperturbatively. Our results provide an efficient approximation for the phonon spectral functions of low-density polaron metals, a regime relevant to weakly doped insulators.