Спектралне функције и покретљивост Холштајновог поларона
Petar Mitrić
Abstract
The electron-phonon interaction significantly affects the properties of semiconducting materials. Because of it, the phononic cloud can renormalize electrons, which leads to the emergence of polarons - a new quasiparticle that now, instead of the electron, plays the role of the current carrier in our system. The consequences of polaron formation are most easily studied using simplified models of electronphonon systems. Among these models, the simplest one is the Holstein model, which successfully reproduces the most important polaronic effects. In practice, the Holstein model is used for testing and developing various theoretical methods that can subsequently be applied to more complex models or even real materials. The goal of this dissertation is to investigate the single-particle and transport properties of the Holstein model using different methods. Until recently, it was widely accepted that the dynamical mean-field theory (DMFT) provides a good description of the single-particle properties of the Holstein model only in the cases of threedimensional or even higher-dimensional systems. However, our results show that DMFT actually provides an excellent description of single-particle properties even in the one-dimensional case, regardless of the regime, which is determined by temperature, phonon frequency, and electron-phonon coupling strength. We have reached these conclusions by comparing the results obtained using this method, with the most reliable results currently available in the literature. Although DMFT is approximate, it is also a nonperturbative method that is exact in two different limits: in the weak coupling limit and in the atomic limit. Having in mind that DMFT neglects non-local correlations, which are most pronounced in the one-dimensional case, our conclusions about the high reliability of this method are expected to continue to hold in an arbitrary number of dimensions as well. This has been explicitly verified on the example of the effective mass in one-, two-, and three-dimensional cases. In addition, we have also presented a numerical procedure for the application of DMFT that requires very little computational resources. Therefore, this method allows us to easily generate a large amount of reliable results in different regimes, which can now be used to assess the quality of any other method. One such method that we intend to investigate more thoroughly is the cumulant expansion (CE) Method. In contrast to DMFT, the CE is a perturbative method that does not rely on Dyson’s equation for the calculation of the single-particle properties. Although CE does not provide reliable results in all regimes, the advantage of this method in comparison to the DMFT is that it can be easily applied to significantly more complex models, and even to real materials. Therefore, it is very important to determine in which parameter regimes can CE be expected to give an adequate description of the observed physical system. In this dissertation, this was investigated on the example of the Holstein model, by comparing the CE with the DMFT results, which we have already established as reliable. It turns out that, although CE is exact only in the weak coupling and atomic limits, reliable approximate predictions of this method are possible even for moderate interactions, where the corresponding spectral function accurately reproduces both the quasiparticle and the first satellite peak. This is signifix icantly better than what would be obtained using the lowest-order perturbation theory. In addition, the high-temperature results of the CE look promising, although we proved, using the spectral sum rules, that this method cannot be exact in the limit T → ∞. For the study of transport properties, we focused on calculating mobility and a somewhat more general quantity, the optical conductivity.Within the framework of linear response theory, both of these quantities can be represented as the sum of the so-called bubble term, determined by the single-particle properties, and vertex corrections. The bubble term for mobility μ was calculated numerically, and detailed comparisons were made between the DMFT and CE predictions. We established that at high temperatures, the charge mobility assumes a power law μ ∝ T−2 in the case of very weak coupling, and μ ∝ T−3/2 for somewhat stronger coupling. We analytically proved that in the weak coupling and atomic limits of the Holstein model, the vertex corrections of mobility are vanishing. In all other regimes, the contribution of vertex corrections was examined numerically, by calculating the bubble term using the DMFT and by comparing it to the exact result from the literature.