The ground-state characterization of the polaron problem is retrieved within the framework of a variational scheme proposed previously by Devreese et al for the bound polaron. The formulation is based on the standard canonical transformation of the strong coupling ansatz and consists of a variationally determined perturbative extension serving for the theory to interpolate in the overall range of the coupling constant. Specializing our considerations to the bulk and strict two-dimensional polaron models we see that the theory yields significantly improved energy upper bounds in the strong coupling regime and, moreover, extrapolates itself successfully towards the well-established weak coupling limits for all polaron quantities of general interest.
The ground-state characterization of the polaron problem is retrieved within the framework of a variational scheme proposed previously by Devreese et al for the bound polaron. The formulation is based on the standard canonical transformation of the strong coupling ansatz and consists of a variationally determined perturbative extension serving for the theory to interpolate in the overall range of the coupling constant. Specializing our considerations to the bulk and strict two-dimensional polaron models we see that the theory yields significantly improved energy upper bounds in the strong coupling regime and, moreover, extrapolates itself successfully towards the well-established weak coupling limits for all polaron quantities of general interest.
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 main quasi-particle characteristics of the one-dimensional polaron are estimated within and beyond the most general Gaussian approximation at arbitrary electron-phonon coupling. We have derived explicitly the ground-state energy and the effective mass in the weak- and strong-coupling regimes. For arbitrary coupling, the Gaussian leading-order term of the polaron self energy improves the corresponding Feynman estimate and represents the lowest upper bound available. We have calculated the next non-Gaussian corrections. Taking into account systematically higher-order corrections does not perturb considerably the obtained results.
Using a variational ansatz in which pair correlations between wave vectors of virtually emitted phonons are taken into account, we have obtained better upper bounds to the polaron ground-state energy than have been available heretofore for $\ensuremath{\alpha}\ensuremath{\le}3.5$. The same variational trial functions are also used to obtain lower bounds for $\ensuremath{\alpha}\ensuremath{\le}2.5$. These lower bounds, although not completely rigorous, represent a considerable improvement over the Lieb-Yamazaki values, which are, to the author's knowledge, the only other lower bounds in the literature. The variational ansatz chosen is also suitable for practical calculations of the polaron effective mass.
A general method is presented for obtaining an accurate intermediate-coupling theory from weak- and strong-coupling perturbation theory. The method uses two-point Pad\'e approximants to extrapolate (low-order) expansions about the weak- and the strong-coupling limits into the intermediate-coupling regime. The method is used to evaluate the ground-state energy and effective mass of the polaron with gratifying success. In addition, the weak-coupling perturbation theory of the polaron dispersion relation, ground-state energy, and effective mass are extended to fourth, sixth, and fourth order, respectively. A scheme based on two-point Pad\'e approximants is used to obtain an optimal polaron dispersion relation.
This thesis is concerned with the quantum mechanical system of a single particle interacting with an ideal gas of identical fermions by point interaction. In the physics literature this system is often referred to as Fermi polaron. We investigate the two-dimensional Fermi polaron. Unlike the one-dimensional case, point interactions in two or three dimensions cannot be implemented as perturbation of the quadratic form of the Laplacian. Either they are obtained as self-adjoint extensions of the Laplacian restricted to functions that vanish when the coordinates of two particles coincide, or they are constructed by a suitable limiting process. Choosing the second approach, a many-body operator with two-particle point interaction has firstly been rigorously defined by Dell'Antonio, Figari and Teta. We consider the Fermi polaron confined to a box with periodic boundary conditions and we identify a broad class of regularization schemes that approximate the Hamiltonian of the Fermi polaron as limit operator in the strong resolvent sense. The Hamiltonian is not given by a closed form, which could be conveniently used in standard variational principles. We establish a novel variational principle that characterizes all bound states, i.e. all energy eigenstates below the bottom of the spectrum of the kinetic energy. This variational principle turns out to be very useful for the following purposes. The ground state of the Fermi polaron is expected to be well approximated by the polaron and the molecule ansatz in the regime of weak and strong coupling between the impurity and the Fermi gas, respectively. In the physics literature, these two classes of trial states are used for variational computations with the (ultraviolet) regularized Hamiltonian. Although the implicit expressions for the minimal energy of both classes allow for the removal of the ultraviolet cutoff, it remains unclear whether the results are upper bounds to the ground state energy of the Fermi polaron. We show that the minimization of energy over polaron and molecule trial states can be reformulated in a natural way with the help of our variational principle. By doing so, the classes of trial states simplify considerably, and since there is no reference to regularized quantities, we can prove that the expressions for the polaron and the molecule energy in the physics literature are indeed upper bounds to the ground state energy of the Fermi polaron. As a further application of the variational principle, we prove analytically that to first order in a particle-hole expansion the molecule ansatz yields a better approximation to the ground state energy than the polaron ansatz if the coupling between the impurity and the Fermi gas is strong enough. So far, this had only been done numerically. The concluding chapter is devoted to the derivation of a lower bound to the ground state energy of the Fermi polaron in two-dimensional space. We show that the ground state energy can be bounded from below by a quantity that does not depend on the number of fermions in the Fermi gas. This result is correct under the assumption that the ratio of the mass of the impurity and the mass of a fermion exceeds 1.225. We also present a method which might yield a similar result for lower mass ratios. This method gives an estimate for the quadratic form of the regularized Hamiltonian in position space representation. In this connection, we present an inequality that bounds a singular potential of a two-dimensional Fermi gas depending only on the minimal distance between two fermions by the kinetic energy of the Fermi gas uniformly in the number of fermions. This inequality also applies to a potential with singularity 1/r^2, for which the Hardy inequality does not hold in two dimensions. Therefore, the full antisymmetry of the wave function has to be taken into account.
The energies of bipolaron states in three- and two-dimensional systems are calculated variationally, treating the electron-phonon interaction in the Fr\"ohlich approximation, and separating the relative motion from the center-of-mass motion. The bipolaron is bound if the electron-phonon coupling constant \ensuremath{\alpha} is larger than 6 in three dimensions and 2 in two dimensions, provided the ratio \ensuremath{\eta}=${\mathrm{\ensuremath{\epsilon}}}_{\mathrm{\ensuremath{\infty}}}$/${\mathrm{\ensuremath{\epsilon}}}_{0}$ is smaller than a critical value which depends on \ensuremath{\alpha}. The theory yields the free-polaron energies as given in the Lee, Low, and Pines approximation for arbitrary values of the electron-phonon coupling constant \ensuremath{\alpha}. For \ensuremath{\alpha} larger than \ensuremath{\sim}10 and \ensuremath{\sim}4 in the three- and two-dimensional cases, respectively, the lowest free-polaron self-energies are obtained in the strong-coupling approach; it is shown that a trial harmonic envelope wave function, localized both in the center-of-mass and relative coordinates, with a coherent phonon state gives a bound localized bipolaron state of lower energy. It is interesting for application to high-Tc superconductivity that the bipolaron bounds more easily in two dimensions than in three, and that the mean value of the pair radius is a few angstroms. Furthermore, bipolaron states obtained when the linear total momentum is conserved have intrinsically high mobility, which is also an important condition to make the bipolaron mechanism consistent with high-temperature superconductivity.