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 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.
Electrons interacting with the ions in a solid, or polarons, are some of the most basic condensed matter quasi-particles. They influence the electric conductivity in normal metals, but perhaps most fascinatingly, they mediate the formation of Cooper pairs in low temperature superconductors. The details of this phonon mediation are poorly understood at the level of a microscopic Hamiltonian. The Hamiltonian for basic polaron models has only recently been solved for the single electron, and seems to predict that the polarons in low temperature superconductors would have very large effective masses. This is at odds with the measured small effective masses of many low temperature superconductors in the normal state. In this thesis we examine extensions to the basic Holstein polaron Hamiltonian that provide a more realistic model of what happens in real materials. We also look at the BLF-SSH model, which is the appropriate Hamiltonian for superconductors without optical phonons such as the elemental superconductors. We found that extending the Holstein model to include next nearest neighbour electron hopping and nearest neighbour electron-phonon interactions changed the effective mass slightly, but nowhere near enough to account for the low effective masses that must be present in real materials. The BLF-SSH model was examined in the adiabatic limit and with weak-coupling perturbation theory, but an exact solution was not found. It seems likely that the effective mass for this model is also very large, but an improved algorithm is necessary to prove this. A potential path forward is presented in the appendix.
The polaron formation is investigated in the intermediate regime of the Holstein model by using an exact diagonalization technique for the one-dimensional infinite lattice. The numerical results for the electron and phonon propagators are compared with the nonadiabatic weak- and strong-coupling perturbation theories, as well as with the harmonic adiabatic approximation. A qualitative explanation of the crossover regime between the self-trapped and free-particle-like behaviors, not well-understood previously, is proposed. It is shown that a fine balance of nonadiabatic and adiabatic contributions determines the motion of small polarons, making them light. A comprehensive analysis of spatially and temporally resolved low-frequency lattice correlations that characterize the translationally invariant polaron states is derived. Various behaviors of the polaronic deformation field, ranging from classical adiabatic for strong couplings to quantum nonadiabatic for weak couplings, are discussed.
We present a detailed numerical study of the one-dimensional Holstein model with a view to understanding the self-trapping process of electrons or excitons in crystals with short-range particle-lattice interactions. Applying a very efficient variational Lanczos method, we are able to analyze the ground-state properties of the system in the weak- and strong-coupling, adiabatic and nonadiabatic regimes on lattices large enough to eliminate finite-size effects. In particular, we obtain the complete phase diagram and comment on the existence of a critical length for self-trapping in finite (closed) one-dimensional systems. In order to characterize large and small polaron states we calculate self-consistently the lattice distortions and the particle-phonon correlation functions. In the strong-coupling case, two distinct types of small polaron states are shown to be possible according to the relative importance of static displacement field and dynamic polaron effects. Special emphasis is on the intermediate-coupling regime, which we also study by means of direct diagonalization, preserving the full dynamics and quantum nature of phonons. The crossover from large to small polarons shows up in a strong decrease of the kinetic energy accompanied by a substantial change in the optical absorption spectra. We show that our numerical results in all important limiting cases reveal excellent agreement with both analytical perturbation theory predictions and very recent density matrix renormalization group data.
The paper deals with the ground and the first excited state of the polaron in the one-dimensional Holstein model. Various variational methods are used to investigate both the weak-coupling and strong-coupling case, as well as the crossover regime between them. Two of the methods, presented here, introduce interesting elements to the understanding of the nature of the polaron. Reliable numerical evidence is found that, in the strong-coupling regime, the ground and the first excited state of the self-trapped polaron are well described within the adiabatic limit. The lattice vibration modes associated with the self-trapped polarons are analyzed in detail, and the frequency softening of the vibration mode at the central site of the small polaron is estimated. It is shown that the first excited state of the system in the strong-coupling regime corresponds to the excitation of the soft phonon mode within the polaron. In the crossover regime, the ground and the first excited state of the system can be approximated by the anticrossing of the self-trapped and the delocalized polaron state. In this way, the connection between the behavior of the ground and the first excited state is qualitatively explained.
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.
The Holstein model often serves as an archetype for electron-phonon interactions and polaron formation in solids. However, precise descriptions of the Holstein polaron are difficult when the phonon frequency is small and the electron-phonon coupling is strong, due to the presence of many phonons in the ground-state. We present a semi-analytical approximation that consists of a variational ansatz with clouds of phonons surrounding the electron in the form of coherent states. This becomes particularly simple and exact in the Lang-Firsov limit. We determine the domain of validity away from this limit, and further explore the improvement achieved with a removal of the requirement that the phonon clouds form coherent states. Both approximations work extremely well for the ground-state energy at strong coupling, and both work surprisingly well also at weak-coupling. For the effective mass, however, both approximations have difficulty, particularly in the crossover region. Moreover, the coherent-state ansatz (CSA) retains an unphysical jump in the crossover region. Nonetheless, the CSA provides a simple and intuitive picture of the polaron ground-state wavefunction, and in addition predicts accurate values for the ground-state energy.