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Polaron physics beyond the Holstein model

D. J. J. Marchand

Published Jan 1, 2011• 1 citation
Publisher

Abstract

Many condensed matter problems involve a particle coupled to its environment. The polaron, originally introduced to describe electrons in a polarizable medium, describes a particle coupled to a bosonic field. The Holstein polaron model, although simple, including only optical Einstein phonons and an interaction that couples them to the electron density, captures almost all of the standard polaronic properties. We herein investigate polarons that differ significantly from this behaviour. We study a model with phonon-modulated hopping, and find a radically different behaviour at strong couplings. We report a sharp transition, not a crossover, with a diverging effective mass at the critical coupling. We also look at a model with acoustic phonons, away from the perturbative limit, and again discover unusual polaron properties. Our work relies on the Bold Diagrammatic Monte Carlo (BDMC) method, which samples Feynman diagrammatic expansions efficiently, even those with weak sign problems. Proposed by Prokof'ev and Svistunov, it is extended to lattice polarons for the first time here. We also use the Momentum Average (MA) approximation, an analytical method proposed by Berciu, and find an excellent agreement with the BDMC results. A novel MA approximation able to treat dispersive phonons is also presented, along with a new exact solution for finite systems, inspired by the same formalism.

DOI
10.14288/1.0072255

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ISTA Thesis

Krzysztof Myśliwy

The polaron model is a basic model of quantum field theory describing a single particle interacting with a bosonic field. It arises in many physical contexts. We are mostly concerned with models applicable in the context of an impurity atom in a Bose-Einstein condensate as well as the problem of electrons moving in polar crystals. The model has a simple structure in which the interaction of the particle with the field is given by a term linear in the field’s creation and annihilation operators. In this work, we investigate the properties of this model by providing rigorous estimates on various energies relevant to the problem. The estimates are obtained, for the most part, by suitable operator techniques which constitute the principal mathematical substance of the thesis. The first application of these techniques is to derive the polaron model rigorously from first principles, i.e., from a full microscopic quantum-mechanical many-body problem involving an impurity in an otherwise homogeneous system. We accomplish this for the N + 1 Bose gas in the mean-field regime by showing that a suitable polaron-type Hamiltonian arises at weak interactions as a low-energy effective theory for this problem. In the second part, we investigate rigorously the ground state of the model at fixed momentum and for large values of the coupling constant. Qualitatively, the system is expected to display a transition from the quasi-particle behavior at small momenta, where the dispersion relation is parabolic and the particle moves through the medium dragging along a cloud of phonons, to the radiative behavior at larger momenta where the polaron decelerates and emits free phonons. At the same time, in the strong coupling regime, the bosonic field is expected to behave purely classically. Accordingly, the effective mass of the polaron at strong coupling is conjectured to be asymptotically equal to the one obtained from the semiclassical counterpart of the problem, first studied by Landau and Pekar in the 1940s. For polaron models with regularized form factors and phonon dispersion relations of superfluid type, i.e., bounded below by a linear function of the wavenumbers for all phonon momenta as in the interacting Bose gas, we prove that for a large window of momenta below the radiation threshold, the energy-momentum relation at strong coupling is indeed essentially a parabola with semi-latus rectum equal to the Landau–Pekar effective mass, as expected. For the Fröhlich polaron describing electrons in polar crystals where the dispersion relation is of the optical type and the form factor is formally UV–singular due to the nature of the point charge-dipole interaction, we are able to give the corresponding upper bound. In contrast to the regular case, this requires the inclusion of the quantum fluctuations of the phonon field, which makes the problem considerably more difficult. The results are supplemented by studies on the absolute ground-state energy at strong coupling, a proof of the divergence of the effective mass with the coupling constant for a wide class of polaron models, as well as the discussion of the apparent UV singularity of the Fröhlich model and the application of the techniques used for its removal for the energy estimates.

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Many condensed matter problems involve a particle coupled to its environment. The polaron, originally introduced to describe electrons in a polarizable medium, describes a particle coupled to a bosonic field. The Holstein polaron model, although simple, including only optical Einstein phonons and an interaction that couples them to the electron density, captures almost all of the standard polaronic properties. We herein investigate polarons that differ significantly from this behaviour. We study a model with phonon-modulated hopping, and find a radically different behaviour at strong couplings. We report a sharp transition, not a crossover, with a diverging effective mass at the critical coupling. We also look at a model with acoustic phonons, away from the perturbative limit, and again discover unusual polaron properties. Our work relies on the Bold Diagrammatic Monte Carlo (BDMC) method, which samples Feynman diagrammatic expansions efficiently, even those with weak sign problems. Proposed by Prokof'ev and Svistunov, it is extended to lattice polarons for the first time here. We also use the Momentum Average (MA) approximation, an analytical method proposed by Berciu, and find an excellent agreement with the BDMC results. A novel MA approximation able to treat dispersive phonons is also presented, along with a new exact solution for finite systems, inspired by the same formalism.
We introduce the first bold diagrammatic Monte Carlo approach to deal with polaron problems at a finite electron density nonperturbatively, i.e., by including vertex corrections to high orders. Using the Holstein model on a square lattice as a prototypical example, we demonstrate that our method is capable of providing accurate results in the thermodynamic limit in all regimes from a renormalized Fermi liquid to a single polaron, across the nonadiabatic region where Fermi and Debye energies are of the same order of magnitude. By accounting for vertex corrections, the accuracy of the theoretical description is increased by orders of magnitude relative to the lowest-order self-consistent Born approximation employed in most studies. We also find that for the electron-phonon coupling typical for real materials, the quasiparticle effective mass increases and the quasiparticle residue decreases with increasing the electron density at constant electron-phonon coupling strength.
In the present work, the problem of an all-coupling analytic description for the optical conductivity of the Fr\"ohlich polaron is treated, with the goal being to bridge the gap in the validity range that exists between two complementary methods: on the one hand, the memory-function formalism and, on the other hand, the strong-coupling expansion based on the Franck-Condon picture for the polaron response. At intermediate coupling, both methods were found to fail as they do not reproduce diagrammatic quantum Monte Carlo results. To resolve this, we modify the memory-function formalism with respect to the Feynman-Hellwarth-Iddings-Platzman approach in order to take into account a nonquadratic interaction in a model system for the polaron. The strong-coupling expansion is extended beyond the adiabatic approximation by including in the treatment nonadiabatic transitions between excited polaron states. The polaron optical conductivity that we obtain at T=0T=0T=0 by combining the two extended methods agrees well, both qualitatively and quantitatively, with the diagrammatic quantum Monte Carlo results in the whole available range of the electron-phonon coupling strength.
Polarons with different types of electron-phonon coupling have fundamentally different properties. When the dominant interaction is between the electron density and lattice displacement, the momentum of the ground state does not change and the polaron gets exponentially heavy at strong coupling. In contrast, one-dimensional Peierls/Su-Schrieffer-Heeger (PSSH) polarons with interaction originating from displacement-modulated hopping feature a shift of the ground-state momentum to finite values and moderate values of effective mass as coupling is increased [D. J. J. Marchand et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 105, 266605 (2010)]. Based on Diagrammatic Monte Carlo method, we investigate whether unusual properties of PSSH polarons depend on the type of the displacement-modulated hopping and to what degree they survive in higher dimension. We study two different PSSH models: with bosonic degrees of freedom residing on sites (model A) and bonds (model B) of the two-dimensional square lattice. For model A, we find that in both adiabatic and intermediate regimes, the momentum of the ground state experiences a continuous transition from zero to a finite value as a function of coupling strength. The transition is driven by quadratic instability of the dispersion function, implying that effective mass diverges at the critical point, and then decreases in an anisotropic fashion with increasing coupling. Unexpectedly, for model B, the momentum of the ground state always stays at zero and the effective mass increases monotonously with coupling. The increase is far from exponential and tends to level off at strong interaction, resulting in relatively light polarons. Having light polarons in the strong coupling regime is crucial for the bipolaron mechanism of high-temperature superconductivity [J. Sous, M. Chakraborty, R. V. Krems, and M. Berciu, Phys. Rev. Lett. 121, 247001 (2018).]
The electron-phonon interaction is one of the fundamental interactions in almost all condensed matter materials. In conventional superconductors, the electron-phonon interaction is the glue that attracts two electrons to one another to form a pair. A strong electron-phonon interaction leads to the concept of a polaron, which is an electron with lattice distortions around it. The small polaron is a polaron with spatial extent comparable to an interatomic dimension of the solid. Evidence for polarons has been identified in many experiments in superconductors and semiconductors. In this thesis we present exact calculations of the polaron. Specifically we have refined Trugman's method to solve the ground state of an electron-phonon coupled system in the whole parameter regime, and we also generalized this method to treat spin-orbit coupled systems. The most difficult regimes, which is the strong-coupling regime and the small phonon frequency limit, have been solved by these refinements. There are three representative kinds of electron-phonon interaction, the Holstein model, the Fr"ohlich model and the BLF-SSH model. In this thesis we have addressed the first and the third one. The second one, the Fr"ohlich model, is very similar to the Holstein model but the interaction is nonlocal. For the Holstein model we have observed the expected smooth crossover from free electrons to small polarons, while for the BLF-SSH model, we have studied the weak coupling regime with perturbation theory and derived a new analytical result for the one-dimensional problem.
The polaron model is a basic model of quantum field theory describing a single particle interacting with a bosonic field. It arises in many physical contexts. We are mostly concerned with models applicable in the context of an impurity atom in a Bose-Einstein condensate as well as the problem of electrons moving in polar crystals. The model has a simple structure in which the interaction of the particle with the field is given by a term linear in the field’s creation and annihilation operators. In this work, we investigate the properties of this model by providing rigorous estimates on various energies relevant to the problem. The estimates are obtained, for the most part, by suitable operator techniques which constitute the principal mathematical substance of the thesis. The first application of these techniques is to derive the polaron model rigorously from first principles, i.e., from a full microscopic quantum-mechanical many-body problem involving an impurity in an otherwise homogeneous system. We accomplish this for the N + 1 Bose gas in the mean-field regime by showing that a suitable polaron-type Hamiltonian arises at weak interactions as a low-energy effective theory for this problem. In the second part, we investigate rigorously the ground state of the model at fixed momentum and for large values of the coupling constant. Qualitatively, the system is expected to display a transition from the quasi-particle behavior at small momenta, where the dispersion relation is parabolic and the particle moves through the medium dragging along a cloud of phonons, to the radiative behavior at larger momenta where the polaron decelerates and emits free phonons. At the same time, in the strong coupling regime, the bosonic field is expected to behave purely classically. Accordingly, the effective mass of the polaron at strong coupling is conjectured to be asymptotically equal to the one obtained from the semiclassical counterpart of the problem, first studied by Landau and Pekar in the 1940s. For polaron models with regularized form factors and phonon dispersion relations of superfluid type, i.e., bounded below by a linear function of the wavenumbers for all phonon momenta as in the interacting Bose gas, we prove that for a large window of momenta below the radiation threshold, the energy-momentum relation at strong coupling is indeed essentially a parabola with semi-latus rectum equal to the Landau–Pekar effective mass, as expected. For the Fröhlich polaron describing electrons in polar crystals where the dispersion relation is of the optical type and the form factor is formally UV–singular due to the nature of the point charge-dipole interaction, we are able to give the corresponding upper bound. In contrast to the regular case, this requires the inclusion of the quantum fluctuations of the phonon field, which makes the problem considerably more difficult. The results are supplemented by studies on the absolute ground-state energy at strong coupling, a proof of the divergence of the effective mass with the coupling constant for a wide class of polaron models, as well as the discussion of the apparent UV singularity of the Fröhlich model and the application of the techniques used for its removal for the energy estimates.