Ground-state energy of a polaron in the strong-coupling region is calculated. Variational method and second-order perturbation theory are used to improve the usual strong-coupling theory. The results obtained are compared with those by the Feynman theory.
The ground state energy of large polarons is investigated by means of squeezed states. First the authors introduced single-mode squeezed states and used the variational method to calculate this energy. This gives a result that is valid in the weak-coupling regime and only for very small values of the coupling constant. In order to improve the result they have considered two-mode squeezed states in which the correlation between phonons is involved. In this way the ground state energy is found to be lower than the Feynman result in the intermediate-coupling regime for alpha < 3.7.
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.
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 nth-order terms in the polaron coupling constant are obtained from nth-order perturbation theory, whereas the traditional perturbation formulation in terms of creation and annihilation operators requires a 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.