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Journal of Physics A Mathematical and General

A note on the ground state of the bound polaron

Wim Huybrechts, T. Lukes

Published Oct 1, 1975• 2 citations
Publisher

Abstract

It is shown that the action in Feynman's representation of the Hamiltonian of the free polaron may be approximated by a Coulombic term in the strong coupling limit. This leads to an analytic approximation for the ground state energy of a bound polaron.
DOI
10.1088/0305-4470/8/10/023

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Physical Review•Aug 1, 1958•79 citations
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.
The Fr\"ohlich Hamiltonian is generalized to the case of an electron moving in n space dimensions. For n=2 and n=3 the familiar Fr\"ohlich Hamiltonian is reobtained. The polaron ground-state energy is calculated up to fourth order in perturbation theory. We found that within the Feynman two-particle polaron model approximation the polaron ground-state energy satisfies the scaling relation ${E}_{n\mathrm{D}(\mathrm{\ensuremath{\alpha}})}$=(n/3)E3D{\mathrm{E}}_{3\mathrm{D}}E3D​({\ensuremath{\Gamma}[ (n-1)/2]3 \ensuremath{\surd}\ensuremath{\pi} /2n\ensuremath{\Gamma}(n/2)}\ensuremath{\alpha}), where EnD{E}_{n\mathrm{D}}EnD​ is the Feynman polaron ground-state energy for the polaron in n dimensions and E3D{E}_{3\mathrm{D}}E3D​ the energy in three dimensions.
The polaron Hamiltonian would be easily soluble were it not for the quartic term appearing therein. It is proposed to substitute for the quartic term a quadratic term having roughly the same properties, and in such a way that the ground-state energy of the new Hamiltonian is rigorously a lower bound for the true energy. With a very small amount of work one can obtain a lower bound as a continuous function of $\ensuremath{\alpha}$ for all values of $\ensuremath{\alpha}$. The result agrees fairly well with the results obtained by other methods. Using the equivalent Hamiltonian one can also obtain an analytic expression for the effective mass, although one cannot say it is a bound for the true effective mass. Futhermore, once one has obtained a lower bound for the energy as a continuous function of the parameters of the Hamiltonian, one can rigorously derive upper and lower bounds for the ground-state expectation values of various operators. For example, it can be shown that for large $\ensuremath{\alpha}$ and large k, $〈{{a}_{\mathrm{k}}}^{*}{a}_{\mathrm{k}}〉\ensuremath{\sim}{\mathrm{k}}^{\ensuremath{-}6}$ and not ${\mathbf{k}}^{\ensuremath{-}2}$ exp(-${\mathbf{k}}^{\ensuremath{-}2}$) as in Pekar's solution. Because of its simplicity, it is possible that this method may have application to other ground-state problems.