This chapter examines the energy of the resulting quasi-particle using the Green function technique. The field-theoretic Green function technique developed originally by Feynman, Dyson, and others for quantum electrodynamics finds extensive applications to the many body problems encountered in different branches of physics, for its proven efficacy in dealing with the dynamical effects associated with these problems. The Green function formalism is essentially a systematic time-dependent perturbation theory involving certain quantities called the Green functions or propagators. The energy-dependent Green function, G, provides great many physical information about a system, in particular the energy of the quasi-particles. Puff and Whitfield have considered the thermodynamic Green functions for the problem and found at the end of the calculation the zero-temperature limit. In the zero-temperature limit the approximate thermodynamic Green function of Mahan becomes equivalent to the intermediate coupling polaron model of Haeringen and is thus expected to give the same result as given by method of Haeringen.
This chapter examines the energy of the resulting quasi-particle using the Green function technique. The field-theoretic Green function technique developed originally by Feynman, Dyson, and others for quantum electrodynamics finds extensive applications to the many body problems encountered in different branches of physics, for its proven efficacy in dealing with the dynamical effects associated with these problems. The Green function formalism is essentially a systematic time-dependent perturbation theory involving certain quantities called the Green functions or propagators. The energy-dependent Green function, G, provides great many physical information about a system, in particular the energy of the quasi-particles. Puff and Whitfield have considered the thermodynamic Green functions for the problem and found at the end of the calculation the zero-temperature limit. In the zero-temperature limit the approximate thermodynamic Green function of Mahan becomes equivalent to the intermediate coupling polaron model of Haeringen and is thus expected to give the same result as given by method of Haeringen.
To avoid confusion, it is necessary to be quite explicit about what is assumed and what is to be proved. A. Klein, Phys. Rev. 121, 950 (1961) Summary The topic of this chapter is functionals that provide a concise formulation for thermodynamic quantities and Green's function methods in interacting many-body systems. Building upon the instructive examples of density functional theory and the Hartree– Fock approximation, functionals of the Green's function are developed to provide a framework for practical methods used extensively in many-body perturbation theory (Chs. 9–15), dynamical mean-field theory (Chs. 16–20), and their combination in Ch. 21. Functional concepts give a firm foundation for those methods, for example, they give the conditions for approximations to obey conservation laws. Additional background and specific aspects are in App. H. Many physical quantities can be expressed as functionals , i.e., they depend on an entire function.1 For example, in the quantum variational method to determine a wavefunction, the total energy of a system of many electrons is a functional of a many-body trial wavefunction ( r 1 , r 2 , …): it is the expectation value of the hamiltonian. At the variational minimum, assuming the trial wavefunction is completely flexible, one finds the many-body Schrödinger equation for the ground state. Many of the properties we are interested in are, formally, simple functionals of the ground- or excited-state wavefunctions. In the search for feasible ways to calculate properties such as excitation spectra, we are led to different types of functional. The idea is to deal only with a physical, measurable quantity Q of interest and a variational functional E [ Q ] of this quantity. The variational character of E allows one to derive equations that determine Q 0 , the value of Q for the system in a desired state, typically the ground state or equilibrium state at T ≠ 0. Other properties should be different functionals F m [ Q ] that can then be evaluated at Q = Q 0 . This strategy is outlined in Fig. 8.1. To appreciate the power of such approaches, one can consider the impact of density functional theory, which is formulated as a functional of the density n ( r ) of electrons; it is defined for a range of densities and the variational minimum for the energy functional E [ n ] leads to equations to determine the actual ground-state density n 0 ( r ) and total energy E 0 .
This chapter describes the salient properties of zero-temperature, real-time finite temperature, and thermal Green's functions in turn. It considers the effect of the energy and momentum dependence of the self-energy on quasiparticle propagation in an interacting Fermi system. The chapter illustrates the major points for the case of a nucleon in translationally invariant nuclear matter. Although Green's functions were introduced because of their physical connection to response functions, they contain sufficient information to evaluate all ground state observables or thermal averages. The real-time Green's function, which describes the physical response of a system, may thereby, be obtained from the thermal Green's function. The essential point in relating the optical potential to the self-energy is the observation that the wave function can be written in terms of the one-particle Green's function. A good approximation to the response may be obtained using the response function for a non-interacting Fermi gas corrected for the medium dependence of the nucleon self-energy.
This chapter presents a brief introduction to the path-integral method before applying it to the polaron problem. The coupling theory is based on the path-integral formulation of quantum mechanics developed by Feynman in 1955. The path-integral formalism proves to be a useful tool for many field-theoretic problems. Feynman's path-integral method as applied by Feynman to determine the polaron effective mass has an intuitive rather than formal basis. The comparison revealed unequivocally the superiority of the Feynman model over the entire range of the coupling constant. Schultz also simulated the Feynman approximation by replacing the whole lattice with a second, fictitious particle harmonically bound to the electron by a spring of constant k. Thus, the Feynman's strong-coupling energy is better than the Landau-Pekar energy with the Gaussian trial function. The numerical results reported by Marshall and Mills show that the second-order correction to the Feynman result for the ground state energy is less than 2% for the entire coupling rang.
Art is the elimination of the unnecessary. Pablo Picasso Summary Condensed matter is constituted by a huge number of electrons and nuclei interacting with Coulomb potentials. The topic of this chapter is a way to deal with the full, coupled problem by separating it into a part that is tractable and the rest that is approximated. This naturally leads to the appearance of dynamical fields, and to the concept of “quasi-particles” that have the same quantum numbers as non-interacting electrons. The quasi-particles obey equations where the potential and bare interactions in the hamiltonian are replaced by dynamical self-energies and screened interactions that can describe many of the effects of correlation. In this chapter we discuss the intuitive concepts behind this approach in general terms to motivate the more rigorous formulations and approximations used in the Green's function methods of the following chapter and in Part III. The first equations of this book, Eqs. (1.1) and (1.2), express the fundamental theory of matter in terms of electrons and nuclei that interact with Coulomb potentials. For systems with only a few electrons, a solution of the problem can be obtained by exact diagonalization, using configuration interaction methods. For many-electron systems one has to resort to other methods. For example, QMC stochastic simulations (Chs. 22–25) are among the most accurate methods known to calculate certain expectation values, such as equilibrium thermodynamic properties, total energies, the density, and various static correlation functions like those in Ch. 5. Other properties such as excitation spectra are more difficult to access with QMC. Straightforward perturbation theory is, in general, not appropriate since interactions among the electrons are of the same order of magnitude as the independent-particle terms. Hence, we must develop other approaches. One strategy that gives access to equilibrium thermodynamic as well as dynamical excitation properties is to separate the interacting many-body problem into a part that is tractable by some means and the rest of the problem that is dealt with more approximately. The present chapter is devoted to this idea. It is a prelude to many-body Green's function methods; the aim is to provide a unified framework for the developments in Chs. 8–21, along with a qualitative description of the most relevant quantities.
Develops the many-body one-particle Green function, and explains its physical interpretation in terms of the spectral function, self-energy, and quasiparticle. lifetime. Its application in angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy is presented in detail. The time-evolution operator in the interaction picture is derived, and time-ordering and adiabatic switching-on are introduced as precursor tools to construct the Feynman–Dyson many-body perturbation theory. A detailed account of Wick’s theorem, normal ordering, and contractions is outlined. Feynman diagrams are constructed, and the emergence of the infinite Dyson series from irreducible diagrams is outlined. Two-particle Green function and the particle-hole excitation spectra are developed. Diagramatic application of RPA for interacting systems is described. The finite-temperature Matsubara Green function is introduced and developed, together with its Fourier series representation and the evaluation of Matsubara sums.
The Fröhlich polaron model describes a ubiquitous class of problems concerned with understanding properties of a single mobile particle interacting with a bosonic reservoir. Originally introduced in the context of electrons interacting with phonons in crystals, this model found applications in such diverse areas as strongly correlated electron systems, quantum information, and high energy physics. In the last few years this model has been applied to describe impurity atoms immersed in Bose-Einstein condensates of ultracold atoms. The tunability of microscopic parameters in ensembles of ultracold atoms and the rich experimental toolbox of atomic physics should allow to test many theoretical predictions and give us new insights into equilibrium and dynamical properties of polarons. In these lecture notes we provide an overview of common theoretical approaches that have been used to study BEC polarons, including Rayleigh-Schrödinger and Green's function perturbation theories, self-consistent Born approximation, mean-field approach, Feynman's variational path integral approach, Monte Carlo simulations, renormalization group calculations, and Gaussian variational ansatz. We focus on the renormalization group approach and provide details of analysis that have not been presented in earlier publications. We show that this method helps to resolve striking discrepancy in polaron energies obtained using mean-field approximation and Monte Carlo simulations. We also discuss applications of this method to the calculation of the effective mass of BEC polarons. As one experimentally relevant example of a non-equililbrium problem we consider Bloch oscillations of Bose polarons and demonstrate that one should find considerable deviations from the commonly accepted phenomenological Esaki-Tsu model. We review which parameter regimes of Bose polarons can be achieved in various atomic mixtures.