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.
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 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.
As ones know,the polaron is a quasiparticle formed by an electron and phonons.Due to Coulomb interaction,the electron will make the lattice deformation take place,meanwhile,the deformation potential(induced) by the lattice deformation will exert on the electron,the electron-phonon interaction influence doubtless on the state of motion of an electron,for example,the energy band and effective mass of an electron could change by the interaction,the electron can also be trapped by the deformable lattice,therefore,the research on the(polaron) is very important in understanding optical and transport properties of a solid. Studying electron-phonon interaction has been a main subject in condensed matter physics;in experiments,the influences of the temperature on the forbidden-band width of semiconductors have been observed very early,with the increase of the temperature,the forbidden-band width of most semiconductors will narrow,but a few will widen,these situations are closely relevant to the electron-phonon interaction.In particular,(recently),a large amount of experimental results,ranging from infrared spectroscopy to transport properties(involving) the colossal magnetoresistance and high-T_c superconductivity,has pointed out the importance of the electron-phonon interaction,which has renewed the interest in studying the models of the electron-phonon(coupled) system,especially,the Holstein polaron,for its relative simplicity,is the most considered model for the interaction of a single tight-binding electron coupled to phonons. In the past several decades,the Holstein poloron has been studied in detail in one-dimensional lattices,various theoretical methods,such as variational approaches,the Global-Local variational method,the(coherent)-state expansion method,have been developed to study features of the Holstein polaron including ground-state energy,polaron energy band,effective mass and so on.However,so far,the work considering the influences of the temperature on features of the Holstein polaron is little still. The main aim of this paper is to investigate the influences of the temperature on the energy-band width and the effective mass of the Holstein polaron by using the canonical transformation method.It is shown that,at certain coupling strength,the energy-band width of the Holstein polaron will narrow and the effective mass will augment with the increase of the temperature,in particular,when electron-phonon coupling strength is big enough,the energy-band width will become zero rapidly in small region of temperature,in fact,the situation is rapid transition of the polaron from the energy-band state to the self-trapping local state,this is an(interesting) result obtained in the paper.It is obvious that these features of the Holstein polaron are very useful in explaining optical and transport properties of a solid.
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 review a series of exact, analytical and numerical results obtained on the adiabatic Holstein–Hubbard model, many of which are new and non-trivial. We study next the role of the quantum lattice fluctuations that were initially neglected. The possibility of having high- T c bipolaronic superconductors is analysed on the basis of these results. We suggest that models that involve only electron–phonon coupling are very unlikely to produce bipolaronic superconductivity, which is prevented by the spatial ordering of the bipolarons associated with a lattice instability. This is due to a very large effective mass of the bipolarons that can be related to the large Peierls–Nabarro energy barrier required to move these bipolarons through the lattice in the adiabatic limit. We conjecture that high- T c superconductivity originates specifically from the exceptionally well-balanced competition between electron–phonon coupling and electron–electron repulsion. In the restricted region in which, within the mean field approach, the energy of a bipolaron is close to those of two polarons, a new type of electron pairing occurs by formation of pairs of polarons in the spin singlet state. Such a polaron pair, called a spin resonant bipolaron (SRB), is not the standard bipolaron (both could exist in the adiabatic case). Its Peierls–Nabarro energy barrier can be sharply depressed, almost to zero. As a result of quantum lattice fluctuations, its tunnelling energy is sharply enhanced. Then, superconductivity could persist for a relatively large electron–phonon coupling, with an unusually large critical temperature as a Bose condensate of SRBs before becoming, at larger coupling and in any case, an insulating spin–Peierls polaronic phase.
In most cases, as the strength of electron-phonon coupling increases, the effective mass of polarons typically increases. However, in this paper, we uncover a fascinating phenomenon: the presence of light polarons even within the strong coupling regime, where electron-phonon coupling includes both Holstein and bond types (electron-phonon coupling occurring on the hopping bonds). To investigate this, we employ a diagrammatic Monte Carlo method based on the path-integral formulation of the particle sector and the Fock-state representation of the phonon sector. Our study centers on analyzing the impact of bond electron-phonon coupling on the Holstein polaron's essential properties, including its effective mass, ground-state energy, and the average number of phonons. We examine two distinct scenarios: one where the phonon frequency of both Holstein and bond types is the same, and another where the phonon frequency of the Holstein type is twice as large as that of the bond type. In both of these cases, when the Holstein coupling falls within the light mass regime, we observe minimal changes in the effective mass as a function of bond coupling, compared to the case of the bare bond polaron. However, the behavior of the effective mass undergoes a significant change in the heavy mass regime. Most intriguingly, we discover a nonmonotonic dependence of the effective mass on the bond coupling gB when the Holstein coupling gH falls within the heavy mass regime. This finding holds promise, particularly in the context of bipolarons, where achieving a light effective mass and a large binding energy to get a compact size is crucial.
The Holstein Hubbard and Holstein t-J models are studied for a wide range of phonon frequencies, electron-electron, and electron-phonon interaction strengths on finite lattices with up to ten sites by means of direct Lanczos diagonalization. Previously the necessary truncation of the phononic Hilbert space caused serious limitations to either very small systems (four or even two sites) or to weak electron-phonon coupling, in particular in the adiabatic regime. Using parallel computers we were able to investigate the transition from ``large'' to ``small'' polarons in detail. By resolving the low-lying eigenstates of the Hamiltonian and by calculating the spectral function, we can identify a polaron band in the strong-coupling case, whose dispersion deviates from the free-particle dispersion at low and intermediate phonon frequencies. For two electrons (holes) we establish the existence of bipolaronic states and discuss the formation of a bipolaron band. For the two-dimensional Holstein t-J model, we demonstrate that the formation of hole polarons is favored by strong Coulomb correlations. Analyzing hole-hole correlation functions, we find that hole binding is enhanced as a dynamical effect of the electron-phonon interaction. \textcopyright{} 1996 The American Physical Society.