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Journal of the Physical Society of Japan

Free Energy of a Polaron in a Strong Magnetic Field

Motohiko Saitoh

Published Jul 15, 1981• 27 citations
Publisher

Abstract

New results for the free energy of a polaron in a strong magnetic field are presented. The method used here is the extended version of Feynman's pathintegral formalism in which the most general quadratic form containing an infinite number of variational parameters is employed to simulate the variational trial action. A set of nonlinear integral equations is established to determine the upper bound for the free energy in the entire range of electron-phonon coupling constants, temperatures and magnetic fields. Analytical solutions are provided for some limiting cases of interest, and are compared critically with existing calculations of the ground-state energy at zero temperature. The free energy thus obtained is exact to the lowest order in the coupling constant and provides the good interpolation up to the strong coupling regime.

DOI
10.1143/jpsj.50.2295

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Journal of Physics Condensed Matter•Sep 16, 1996•6 citations
New results for the free energy of a polaron in a strong magnetic field are presented. The method used here is the extended version of Feynman's pathintegral formalism in which the most general quadratic form containing an infinite number of variational parameters is employed to simulate the variational trial action. A set of nonlinear integral equations is established to determine the upper bound for the free energy in the entire range of electron-phonon coupling constants, temperatures and magnetic fields. Analytical solutions are provided for some limiting cases of interest, and are compared critically with existing calculations of the ground-state energy at zero temperature. The free energy thus obtained is exact to the lowest order in the coupling constant and provides the good interpolation up to the strong coupling regime.
The free energy of an ideal polaron gas in a static magnetic field is calculated using Feynman's path-integral formalism. The trial action, used in Feynman's polaron theory, is extended to take into account the anisotropy of the effective electron-phonon interaction. This results in a free-energy expression with four variational parameters. According to Feynman's conjecture, the resulting free energy is an upper bound to the exact result. The approximate free energy is expected to provide accurate results for arbitrary electron-phonon coupling strength ($\ensuremath{\alpha}$), temperature (TTT), and magnetic field strength (H\mathcal{H}H). The free energy per polaron is evaluated for limiting values of $\ensuremath{\alpha}$, TTT, and H\mathcal{H}H.
The ground-state energy of the free polaron is calculated, using the Fock approximation. A new model Hamiltonian involving an electron in a harmonic potential of cylindrical symmetry in the presence of a variational magnetic field, internal in origin, is used. This magnetic field, which has no physical existence, introduces the possibility of symmetry breaking. This approach is shown to be equivalent to that of Peters and Devreese (1982), who used path integrals to study the properties of the polaron in a magnetic field, if the variational parameters of their model action are chosen to match those of the author's model and if the magnetic field in the model action is used as a variational parameter whose origin is internal. Using that approach, a strong-coupling ground-state energy much lower than the usual one is found (E 0 =-0.1658 alpha 2 ). It is shown that such a low value cannot be obtained from the adiabatic approximation because a model spectrum having a degenerate ground state has been used. His results call into question the assumption that the energies obtained from the Fock approximation or from the Feynman integrals are upper bounds to the polaron ground-state energy in the case of model actions or Hamiltonians involving magnetic fields.
We present a novel path integral Monte Carlo scheme to solve the Fröhlich polaron model. At intermediate and strong electron-phonon couplings, the polaron self-trapping is properly taken into account at the level of an effective action obtained by a preaveraging procedure with a retarded trial action. We compute the free energy at several couplings and temperatures in three and two dimensions. Our results show that the accuracy of the Feynman variational upper bound for the free energy is always within a few percent. The method can be generalized to the N-polarons case.
We have developed a new equation of motion Green's function theory for the large polaron, that is completely nonperturbative in origin, and therefore gives a unified treatment of the polaron ground state energy for all interaction strengths. The theory also incorporates translational invariance rigorously, a priori. We find the following new results. (a) Previous theories that are valid for all coupling strengths are based on a nonperturbative summation of infinite subsets of entire diagrams (equations of motion), rather than on recoil parts of all diagrams. We can thus recover lowest order results of Feynman for example, via a translationally noninvariant form of the Fock approximation, which resembles that reported in a previous work. (b) The total ground state energy we obtain in the strong coupling limit is E0 = −0.426α2 to lowest order in the coupling constant α, a result substantially below that of previous calculations, E0 = −0.106α2 (using gaussian trial functions in both cases). Our result is also below the lower bound of Lieb and Yamazaki, although we show in a following paper that our result is an upper bound. (c) The origin of the difference of our results compared to that of other strong coupling theories is several fold, and will be presented in detail in subsequent papers. However, the essence of the difference is that the phonons in the field, via their interaction with the electron, assume the role of independent degrees of freedom, in the limit of an infinite number of phonons. We then have a field theoretic problem with an infinite number of degrees of freedom which can exhibit a totally different physical behavior compared to one with a finite number of degrees of freedom. This aspect of the problem has not been given explicit recognition in all other theories, including that of Lieb and Yamazaki.
Energy levels of two-dimensional Fr\"ohlich polarons in a magnetic field are calculated variationally by use of a generalization of the Lee-Low-Pines ansatz for the variational wave function allowing the phonon distribution function to depend on the electronic coordinates. It is shown that this choice leads to the correct interpolation between the weak- and strong-field limits. Comparing our ground-state energies with those obtained within second-order perturbation theory and the path-integral method, we argue that neither of these methods gives a satisfactory description of the dynamics of the electron-phonon interaction under the influence of an external field.
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.