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physica status solidi (b)

Functional Integrals in the Strong Coupling Regime and the Polaron Self‐Energy

Гарий Владимирович Ефимов, Gurjav Ganbold

Published Nov 1, 1991• 18 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Abstract A general method of representation of functional integrals in the strong coupling regime is developed. This method is applied to the computing of polaron ground state energy at large coupling constant.
DOI
10.1002/pssb.2221680116

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Direct evaluation of Feynman's functional integral for the polaron maps it into a standard type of many-body theory. The perturbation expansion is shown to be well controlled and does not require any renormalization. This perturbation expansion has the pleasing feature that $n\mathrm{th}$-order terms in the polaron coupling constant are obtained from $n\mathrm{th}$-order perturbation theory, whereas the traditional perturbation formulation in terms of creation and annihilation operators requires a $2n\mathrm{th}$-order perturbation calculation to generate the same results. In contrast to previous beliefs, the method is shown to enable the calculation of the polaron effective mass and relaxation time directly from the functional-integral expression. The ground-state energy is computed to second order in the polaron coupling constant to illustrate the use of the method and to establish agreement with previous perturbation treatments. In addition, we provide the first perturbation calculation of the polaron effective mass through second order in the coupling constant. Pad\'e approximants are shown to provide a vehicle for analytically extending the perturbation results into the region of intermediate and strong couplings, and the procedure yields reasonable agreement with variational calculations for values of the polaron coupling constant up to about $\ensuremath{\alpha}=10$. In addition, conditions are derived under which the original polaron action, used in the functional integral, reduces to some of the best variational trial actions utilized in the literature.

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Abstract A general method for studying the properties of free and bound polarons at arbitrary strength of electron‐phonon coupling is given from a unified point of view by first performing a suitable canonical transformation of the electron and phonon field operators and subsequently applying the double‐time Green's function formalism to the transformed polaron‐phonon Hamiltonian. Calculating the one‐polaron Green's function in the lowest approximation and employing the variational principle for the free energy, a pair of coupled differential equations is derived for the effective wave function and a trial function as introduced by the canonical transformation. From these equations, the weakly excited polaron energy levels at low temperatures can be found in the entire range of coupling constants when external fields are present. In this paper, detailed calculations are confined to the optical‐polaron problem in the zero‐field case. Intermediate‐ and strong‐coupling formulas for temperature‐dependent polaron self‐energy and effective mass are given. The strong‐coupling regime appears to increase with temperature.

physica status solidi (b)•Jan 1, 1970•12 citations
Direct evaluation of Feynman's functional integral for the polaron maps it into a standard type of many-body theory. The perturbation expansion is shown to be well controlled and does not require any renormalization. This perturbation expansion has the pleasing feature that nthn\mathrm{th}nth-order terms in the polaron coupling constant are obtained from nthn\mathrm{th}nth-order perturbation theory, whereas the traditional perturbation formulation in terms of creation and annihilation operators requires a 2nth2n\mathrm{th}2nth-order perturbation calculation to generate the same results. In contrast to previous beliefs, the method is shown to enable the calculation of the polaron effective mass and relaxation time directly from the functional-integral expression. The ground-state energy is computed to second order in the polaron coupling constant to illustrate the use of the method and to establish agreement with previous perturbation treatments. In addition, we provide the first perturbation calculation of the polaron effective mass through second order in the coupling constant. Pad\'e approximants are shown to provide a vehicle for analytically extending the perturbation results into the region of intermediate and strong couplings, and the procedure yields reasonable agreement with variational calculations for values of the polaron coupling constant up to about $\ensuremath{\alpha}=10$. In addition, conditions are derived under which the original polaron action, used in the functional integral, reduces to some of the best variational trial actions utilized in the literature.
It is well known that two qualitatively different pictures arise in the description of the motion of an electron in an ionic crystal. In the first case, when the electron interacts weakly with the ionic lattice of the crystal, its motion is the same as the motion of a free band electron whose energy is shifted downward with respect to the bottom of the conduction band, and the effective mass is replaced by the renormalized mass (weak-coupling polaron). In the other limiting case, when the electron interacts strongly with the ionic crystal, an entire series of different self-consistent states of the electron and lattice, each of which has its own effective mass and radius (strong-coupling polaron), arises. Although the motion of an electron in an ionic crystal is described in both limiting cases with the help of the Pekar-Frohlich Hamiltonian, each case requires its own special methods of analysis. Thus, for example, in the strong-coupling theory a special form of adiabatic perturbation theory has been developed in which the trans-lational degeneracy is removed before the perturbation expansion is made. It has been possible to relate both descriptions within the framework of Feynman's varia-tional approach, in which a smooth upper bound was obtained for the energy of the ground state of the polaron for all values of the electron-phonon coupling constant a (see Fig. 1). We call attention in this connection to Ref. 6, where the thermodynamic properties are calculated with the help of a special method for performing the calculations and for finding averages of T-products. The approach developed there is more convenient for performing specific calculations than is the use of path integrals. It seems to us that it has definite advantages in the construction of general proofs concerning the choice of the approximating Hamiltonians (this is illustrated in Ref. 6 for the example of the linear Bogolyubov model), in the investigation of the characteristics of the behavior of a polaron in external fields, etc.
The polaron path integral introduced by Feynman is generalized to the case of an electron moving in d space dimensions. A scheme of systematic calculations of the obtained path integral is developed to estimate the ground-state energy of the polaron in the same way for different values of the electron-phonon coupling constant \ensuremath{\alpha}. The leading-order term in this approach yields an upper bound to the polaron self-energy and improves Feynman's variational estimates for d=2 and d=3. A scaling relation between polaron self-energies for different space dimensions is obtained for this term. The next correction to this estimation is calculated by numerical integration for d=2 and d=3.
A novel variational approach is presented for the calculation of the ground-state energy of the polaron in arbitrary N dimensions in the strong-coupling limit. By using the phonon coherent state to represent the wavefunction of phonons, a self-consistent integro-differential equation for the electron wavefunction is derived. The calculated results of the ground-state energy for N = 1, 2 and 3 agree well with the best results in the literature. It is also found that, for arbitrary N, the present results are less than the Feynman path integral ones by small percentages. It is proposed that this approach should be universal for systems involving polarons in the strong-coupling regime.
This chapter presents a brief introduction to the path-integral method before applying it to the polaron problem. The coupling theory is based on the path-integral formulation of quantum mechanics developed by Feynman in 1955. The path-integral formalism proves to be a useful tool for many field-theoretic problems. Feynman's path-integral method as applied by Feynman to determine the polaron effective mass has an intuitive rather than formal basis. The comparison revealed unequivocally the superiority of the Feynman model over the entire range of the coupling constant. Schultz also simulated the Feynman approximation by replacing the whole lattice with a second, fictitious particle harmonically bound to the electron by a spring of constant k. Thus, the Feynman's strong-coupling energy is better than the Landau-Pekar energy with the Gaussian trial function. The numerical results reported by Marshall and Mills show that the second-order correction to the Feynman result for the ground state energy is less than 2% for the entire coupling rang.
Abstract A general method for studying the properties of free and bound polarons at arbitrary strength of electron‐phonon coupling is given from a unified point of view by first performing a suitable canonical transformation of the electron and phonon field operators and subsequently applying the double‐time Green's function formalism to the transformed polaron‐phonon Hamiltonian. Calculating the one‐polaron Green's function in the lowest approximation and employing the variational principle for the free energy, a pair of coupled differential equations is derived for the effective wave function and a trial function as introduced by the canonical transformation. From these equations, the weakly excited polaron energy levels at low temperatures can be found in the entire range of coupling constants when external fields are present. In this paper, detailed calculations are confined to the optical‐polaron problem in the zero‐field case. Intermediate‐ and strong‐coupling formulas for temperature‐dependent polaron self‐energy and effective mass are given. The strong‐coupling regime appears to increase with temperature.