The Momentum Average (MA) approximation is a variational approximation that has been applied to analytically calculate the spectral function of single polarons and bipolarons, and was found to quantitatively match numerical results apart from the strongly adiabatic limit. The MA approximation was recently extended to a low carrier concentration of spinless fermions in 1D by making the additional assumption that the N-fermion ground-state is approximated well by the mean-field ground-state. This allowed the spectral function to be calculated analytically outside the Migdal limit. Good agreement was found with Density Matrix Renormalization Group simulations for fermion concentrations up to 0.15. In this thesis, the same approximation is extended to calculate the spectral function of a Holstein polaron for low carrier concentrations of spinless fermions on square and cubic lattices. Polaron effective mass and quasiparticle weight were found to depend strongly on the concentration x, especially in 3D. The 2D mass renormalizations were found to give a close match (< 5% error) to Bold Diagrammatic Monte Carlo (BDMC) results from the literature at all x < 0.2 when coupling is weak. However, there were significant quantitative differences between MA and BDMC results at large coupling. A possible explanation for this discrepancy is the presence of a soft excitation close to the polaron ground state. In addition, an efficient numerical scheme to calculate the real-space free electron propagator for a noninteracting Fermi sea is presented, which is used to calculate the self-energy for the 3D Green’s function at finite concentrations.
The Momentum Average (MA) approximation is a variational approximation that has been applied to analytically calculate the spectral function of single polarons and bipolarons, and was found to quantitatively match numerical results apart from the strongly adiabatic limit. The MA approximation was recently extended to a low carrier concentration of spinless fermions in 1D by making the additional assumption that the N-fermion ground-state is approximated well by the mean-field ground-state. This allowed the spectral function to be calculated analytically outside the Migdal limit. Good agreement was found with Density Matrix Renormalization Group simulations for fermion concentrations up to 0.15. In this thesis, the same approximation is extended to calculate the spectral function of a Holstein polaron for low carrier concentrations of spinless fermions on square and cubic lattices. Polaron effective mass and quasiparticle weight were found to depend strongly on the concentration x, especially in 3D. The 2D mass renormalizations were found to give a close match (< 5% error) to Bold Diagrammatic Monte Carlo (BDMC) results from the literature at all x < 0.2 when coupling is weak. However, there were significant quantitative differences between MA and BDMC results at large coupling. A possible explanation for this discrepancy is the presence of a soft excitation close to the polaron ground state. In addition, an efficient numerical scheme to calculate the real-space free electron propagator for a noninteracting Fermi sea is presented, which is used to calculate the self-energy for the 3D Green’s function at finite concentrations.
The Momentum Average (MA) approximation is a variational approximation that has been applied to analytically calculate the spectral function of single polarons and bipolarons, and was found to quantitatively match numerical results apart from the strongly adiabatic limit. The MA approximation was recently extended to a low carrier concentration of spinless fermions in 1D by making the additional assumption that the N-fermion ground-state is approximated well by the mean-field ground-state. This allowed the spectral function to be calculated analytically outside the Migdal limit. Good agreement was found with Density Matrix Renormalization Group simulations for fermion concentrations up to 0.15. In this thesis, the same approximation is extended to calculate the spectral function of a Holstein polaron for low carrier concentrations of spinless fermions on square and cubic lattices. Polaron effective mass and quasiparticle weight were found to depend strongly on the concentration x, especially in 3D. The 2D mass renormalizations were found to give a close match (< 5% error) to Bold Diagrammatic Monte Carlo (BDMC) results from the literature at all x < 0.2 when coupling is weak. However, there were significant quantitative differences between MA and BDMC results at large coupling. A possible explanation for this discrepancy is the presence of a soft excitation close to the polaron ground state. In addition, an efficient numerical scheme to calculate the real-space free electron propagator for a noninteracting Fermi sea is presented, which is used to calculate the self-energy for the 3D Green’s function at finite concentrations.
Spectral functions are important quantities that contain a wealth of information about the quasiparticles of a system, and that can also be measured experimentally. For systems with electron-phonon coupling, good approximations for the spectral function are available only in the Migdal limit (at Fermi energies much larger than the typical phonon frequency, E_F\gg \Omega E F ≫ Ω , requiring a large carrier concentration x x ) and in the single polaron limit (at x=0 x = 0 ). Here we show that the region with x\ll 1 x ≪ 1 ( E_F<\Omega E F < Ω ) can also be reliably investigated with the Momentum Average (MA) variational approximation, which essentially describes the formation of a polaron above an inert Fermi sea. Specifically, we show that for the one-dimensional spinless Holstein model, the MA spectral functions compare favorably with those calculated using variationally exact density matrix renormalization group simulations (DMRG) evaluated directly in frequency-space, so long as x<0.1 x < 0.1 and the adiabaticity ratio \Omega/t>0.5 Ω / t > 0.5 . Unlike in the Migdal limit, here 'polaronic physics’ emerges already at moderate couplings. The relevance of these results for a spinful low- x x metal is also discussed.
We use the density matrix renormalization group (DMRG) to compute the phonon spectral function of a one-dimensional spinless Holstein model doped with a low but finite carrier concentration, x≤0.15, as a function of the electron-phonon coupling λ. To the best of our knowledge, these are the first such results in this regime, complementing extensive prior work at the single-polaron level (x→0). We find that significant phonon spectral weight is transferred both below, all the way down to ω=0, and above the bare phonon energy Ω, in stark contrast with the Kohn-anomaly phenomenology expected in the Migdal limit, where weight remains centered near Ω with a kink at q=2kF. No signature of this 2kF kink appears in our results. This behavior is captured qualitatively by the Random Phase Approximation (RPA), and semi-quantitatively, at negligible extra computational cost, by a ``dressed RPA'' scheme in which the electron addition propagator is renormalized using the Momentum Average (MA) approximation for the low-density electron-polaron. By contrast, adding the lowest-order vertex correction to this dressed scheme produces unphysical negative spectral weight, signaling that vertex and propagator dressings must be treated consistently once the propagators are dressed nonperturbatively. Our results provide an efficient approximation for the phonon spectral functions of low-density polaron metals, a regime relevant to weakly doped insulators.
In this work we present a highly efficient and accurate analytical approximation for the Green's function of a polaron: the momentum average (MA) approximation. It is obtained by summing all of the self-energy diagrams, but with each diagram averaged over the momenta of its free propagators. The result becomes exact for both zero bandwidth and for zero electron-phonon coupling, and is accurate everywhere in the parameter space. The approximation is first used to investigate the Holstein model. A detailed analysis of its accuracy is provided through diagrammatics and spectral weight sum rules. It is shown that the resulting Green's function satisfies exactly the first six spectral weight sum rules, and all higher order sum rules are satisfied with great accuracy. Comparison with numerical data also confirms this accuracy. We then show how to improve the MA approximation by systematically improving the accuracy of the self-energy diagrams in such a way that they can still all be summed efficiently. This allows us to fix some of the problems of the zeroth-order MA approximation. The quantitative agreement with numerical data is also improved. Next, we generalize the MA approximation to study the properties of models with momentum-dependent electron-phonon coupling, and then show that further improvements can be obtained based on variational considerations, using the 1D breathing-mode Hamiltonian as a specific example. For example, by using this variational MA, we obtain ground state energies within at most 0.3% error of the numerical data. Finally, we study the effects of a nearby surface on the spectral weight of a Holstein polaron. The broken translational symmetry is accounted for without any additional approximations, and the resulting inhomogeneous MA approximation continues to be accurate for all coupling strengths. We show that the surface changes properties significantly, with bulk values being recovered only very far away from it. We find that the electron-phonon coupling gives rise to an additional surface potential which is responsible for binding surface states even when they are not normally expected. These results demonstrate that interpretation in terms of bulk properties of spectroscopic data sensitive only to a few surface layers is not straightforward.
Abstract We propose a simple variational solution for calculating one-particle spectral functions in lattice models of spinless metals with strong electron-phonon coupling. It is based on a generalization of the Momentum Average variational approximation for single polarons, combined with the assumption that the other fermions in the system are locked into an inert Fermi sea. We expect the method to be accurate for fermion addition spectral functions in metals with a small Fermi energy (nearly empty band), and for fermion removal spectral functions in metals with a large Fermi energy (nearly full band), provided that the characteristic phonon frequency is not too small. Both these regions are far from the region where the Migdal theorem holds, thus our results offer new insights into polaronic behavior in a largely unexplored part of the parameter space. Here, we show results for the Holstein coupling in one-dimension and present ways to gauge their accuracy, but ultimately this will need to be verified against numerical calculations. This variational method can be extended straightforwardly to higher dimensions and other forms of electron-phonon coupling.
We develop and compare several analytical approximations for the ground state and zero-temperature polaron dispersion in finite-width, nonparabolic conduction bands. The main focus of the work is an extension of the Feynman variational method to a tight-binding lattice, where the effective-mass approximation is no longer applicable. The resulting variational formulation is not restricted to a specific phonon dispersion or electron-phonon interaction and provides a uniform description across weak-, intermediate-, and strong-coupling regimes. In addition, we revisit and generalize other analytical approaches traditionally formulated for continuum polarons, including canonical transformations and self-consistent Wigner-Brillouin-type approximations. For lattice polarons, these methods exhibit qualitative features absent in the continuum case, such as a nontrivial connection between weak- and strong-coupling limits. We show that an improved Wigner-Brillouin scheme yields a momentum-dependent polaron self-energy free of resonances and in good agreement with numerically exact results. All methods are applied to the Holstein model on a tight-binding lattice and are benchmarked against numerically exact calculations, including diagrammatic Monte Carlo (both our calculations and preceding works) and exact diagonalization results. Furthermore, the analytical approaches are extended to polarons with Rashba-type spin-orbit coupling, providing a stringent test of their applicability in systems with nontrivial band structure. Our results demonstrate that the modified Feynman variational method yields ground-state energies and dispersions with accuracy comparable to, and in many cases exceeding, that of other established analytical approaches. The developed framework offers a versatile and reliable analytical description of lattice polarons beyond the continuum approximation.