The ground state energy of the acoustic polaron is calculatedby using Huybrechts variational approach.It was verified that the Huybrechts approach is an available approach and is applicable for the whole coupling range.
The ground-state energy of the optical polaron is calculated by the generalized path-integral formulation. The ground-state approximation is made to simplify the complicated expression, and the Ritz variational and direct integration methods are used to obtain the ground-state energy in the whole range of coupling strength. The results agree with previous work, and it is found that there is a transition for coupling constant ${\ensuremath{\alpha}}_{c}\ensuremath{\simeq}9.2$. The ground-state energy obtained by harmonic approximation, which is equivalert to taking Gaussian-like trial wave functions, is compared with those obtained by Pekar's trial wave function.