A new approach to the problem of X-ray edge singularities and peaks of many-body origin observed in the optical spectra is presented. We first establish the analogy between a system of one hole interacting with many electrons and the polaron, where one electron interacts with many phonons. We approach both cases as an eigenvalue problem for the time independent Schrodinger equation, obtain expressions for the many-body eigenstate& in a convenient basis and use them to understand the behavior of the system. In the case of a localized hole with infinite mass, we diagonalize the Hamiltonian exactly using first a wavefunction and then a noncanonical transformation. technique. We -use the expressions for the eigenstates to obtain the exact analytic formulas for the optical spectra, accurate over the whole frequency range. We then apply our techniques to the case of a finite mass valence hole, which is realized in modulation doped quantum wells or wires. In this case we approximately diagonalize the Hamiltonian by treating exactly the most important terms leading to nonperturbative behavior. The terms neglected are identified and can be treated in perturbation theory. Our method provides a clear physical picture and valuable insight into the accurate treatment of many-body Hamiltonians.
A new approach to the problem of X-ray edge singularities and peaks of many-body origin observed in the optical spectra is presented. We first establish the analogy between a system of one hole interacting with many electrons and the polaron, where one electron interacts with many phonons. We approach both cases as an eigenvalue problem for the time independent Schrodinger equation, obtain expressions for the many-body eigenstate& in a convenient basis and use them to understand the behavior of the system. In the case of a localized hole with infinite mass, we diagonalize the Hamiltonian exactly using first a wavefunction and then a noncanonical transformation. technique. We -use the expressions for the eigenstates to obtain the exact analytic formulas for the optical spectra, accurate over the whole frequency range. We then apply our techniques to the case of a finite mass valence hole, which is realized in modulation doped quantum wells or wires. In this case we approximately diagonalize the Hamiltonian by treating exactly the most important terms leading to nonperturbative behavior. The terms neglected are identified and can be treated in perturbation theory. Our method provides a clear physical picture and valuable insight into the accurate treatment of many-body Hamiltonians.
In polar semiconductors and insulators, the Fr\"ohlich interaction between electrons and long-wavelength longitudinal optical phonons induces a many-body renormalization of the carrier effective masses and the appearance of characteristic phonon sidebands in the spectral function, commonly dubbed ``polaron satellites.'' The simplest model that captures these effects is the Fr\"ohlich model, whereby electrons in a parabolic band interact with a dispersionless longitudinal optical phonon. The Fr\"ohlich model has been employed in a number of seminal papers, from early perturbation-theory approaches to modern diagrammatic Monte Carlo calculations. One limitation of this model is that it focuses on undoped systems, thus ignoring carrier screening and Pauli blocking effects that are present in real experiments on doped samples. To overcome this limitation, we here extend the Fr\"ohlich model to the case of doped systems, and we provide exact solutions for the electron spectral function, mass enhancement, and polaron satellites. We perform the analysis using two approaches, namely, Dyson's equation with the Fan-Migdal self-energy, and the second-order cumulant expansion. We find that these two approaches provide qualitatively different results. In particular, Dyson's approach yields better quasiparticle masses and worse satellites, while the cumulant approach provides better satellite structures, at the price of worse quasiparticle masses. Both approaches yield an anomalous enhancement of the electron effective mass at finite doping levels, which in turn leads to a breakdown of the quasiparticle picture in a significant portion of the phase diagram.
The optical absorption of a many (continuum) polaron gas is derived in the framework of a variational approach at zero temperature and weak electron-phonon coupling strength. We derive a compact formula for the optical conductivity of the many-polaron system, taking into account many-body effects in the electron or hole system. Within the method presented here, these effects are contained completely in the dynamical structure factor of the electron or hole system. This allows one to build on well-established studies of the interacting electron gas. Based on this approach a feature in the absorption spectrum of the many-polaron gas, related to the emission of a plasmon together with a phonon, is identified. As an application and illustration of the technique, we compare the theoretical many-polaron optical absorption spectrum as derived in the present work with the ‘‘d-band'' absorption feature in ${\mathrm{Nd}}_{2}{\mathrm{CuO}}_{4\ensuremath{-}\ensuremath{\delta}} (\ensuremath{\delta}<0.004).$ Similarities are shown between the theoretically and the experimentally derived first frequency moment of the optical absorption of a family of differently doped ${\mathrm{Nd}}_{2\ensuremath{-}x}{\mathrm{Ce}}_{x}{\mathrm{CuO}}_{4}$ materials.
The three-band $p\text{\ensuremath{-}}d$ model of strongly correlated electrons interacting with optical phonons via diagonal and off-diagonal electron-phonon interactions is considered within the cluster perturbation theory. In the beginning, the exact diagonalization of the Hamiltonian of a CuO4 cluster results in the construction of local polaronic eigenstates $\left|p\right\ensuremath{\rangle}$ with hole numbers nh=0,1,2 per unit cell. The intercluster hoppings and interactions are exactly written in terms of Hubbard operators ${X}_{f}^{pq}=\left|p\right\ensuremath{\rangle}\ensuremath{\langle}q|$ determined via the multielectron polaronic eigenstates $\left|p\right\ensuremath{\rangle}$ at site f. The Fermi-type single-electron quasiparticle dispersion and spectral weight are calculated for the undoped antiferromagnetic parent insulator like La2CuO4. The quasiparticle dispersion of Hubbard polarons is determined by a hybridization of the Hubbard fermion subbands with local Franck-Condon resonances so the main polaronic effect of the quasiparticle band structure is a splitting of the Hubbard bands on the number of Hubbard polaron subbands. Increasing of the EPI constant results in an increase of splitting, decrease of the subband width, transfer of the spectral weight to high-energy multiphonon excitations, and subsequent localization of the charge carriers. Herewith, the effect of such renormalization for the conduction band and the valence one differs depending on the ratio of the diagonal and off-diagonal EPI. In the framework of the GTB method, the Franck-Condon broadening of the spectral function of polaronic excitations is also reproduced for strongly correlated systems with strong electron-phonon interaction.
The ways of introducing and handling renormalizations in the many-body perturbation theory are reviewed. We stress the indispensable role the technique of Green functions plays in extrapolating the weak-coupling perturbative approaches to intermediate and strong couplings. We separately discuss mass and charge renor- malizations. The former is incorporated in a self-consistent equation for the self-energy derived explicitly from generating Feynman diagrams within the Baym and Kadanoff approach. The latter amounts to self-consistent equations for two-particle irreducible vertices. We analyze the charge renormalization initiated by De Domi- nicis and Martin and demonstrate that its realization via the parquet approach may become a powerful and viable way of using the many-body diagrammatic approach reliably in non-perturbative regimes with coopera- tive phenomena induced by either strong interaction or strong static randomness. Electric and magnetic properties of solids are determined by the behavior of valence electrons weakly bound to the atoms forming the crystalline lattice. The behavior of the gas of valence electrons in solids is most profound in metals with an open Fermi surface. Conduction electrons in metals can be described in a number of situations and for various purposes quite accurately by Bloch waves, eigenstates of the Fermi-gas Hamiltonian. We know, however, that electrons even in metals are not a noninteracting gas. They are generally exposed to forces driving them out of the equilibrium state of the Fermi gas. Firstly, no metal is a pure crystal and hence the electrons do not move freely in space. They are scattered on randomly distributed impurities and lattice defects. Secondly, the electrons are neither free and their mutual repulsion cannot be neglected particularly for transition and heavy metals. It is the most important and long standing task of condensed-matter theorists to comprehend and qualitatively capture the deviations in the behavior of electrons in real metals from their idealized representation via Bloch waves. The problem with quantification of the behavior of electrons beyond the almost free-electron picture is in paucity of available tools for accomplishing this task. Even if we can reduce the description of the electron gas in metals to rather simple and generic models, we are unable to solve them exactly, except for a few limiting cases that mostly do not correspond to situations of physical interest. With the increasing power of modern computers the role of numerical solutions and numerical brute force approaches has increased. Numerical solutions are usually unbiased and can reach a rather high level of quantitative precision. In some aspects they substitute the missing exact analytic solutions. Numerical solutions are suitable and even indispensable in showing and displaying the trends and some global features of the models studied. They, however, fail in critical regions of phase transitions in the vicinity of singularities in correlation functions. In these
The problem of quantum dynamics in open systems has gained attention in recent decades and not the least due to the advances made in quantum transport in molecular systems. The main motivation behind quantum transport and molecular electronics is the futuristic goal to be able at some point to replace, or to complement, the silicon-based technology and to make the electronic devices faster. On a fundamental level, one has to deal with time-dependent processes where electron-electron or electron- phonon interactions are of great importance, and they can cause profound quantitative and qualitative changes on the physical and dynamical properties of electronic systems compared to the non-interacting case. Most of the studies of quantum transport have been focused on the steady-state description while neglecting the short-time dynamics. However, the dynamical effects are of great importance since fast- switching processes play a pivotal role in the operation of future devices. We studied the problem of time-dependent electron transport through the Anderson impurity model by using many-body perturbation theory (MBPT) together with Keldysh Green’s functions as well as with time-dependent density functional theory (TDDFT). These methods were compared with numerically exact time-dependent density-matrix renormalization group (tDMRG) method. We found that the many-body perturbation theory results beyond Hartree-Fock approximation were in close agreement with tDMRG results. In addition we studied the possibility of multistablity in the density and current of an interacting nanoscale junction as well as how to reversibly switch between the multiple solutions in time domain. An accurate theoretical treatment of electron correlation even in as simple model as an interacting electron gas at metallic densities still continues to be a challenge; especially description of features in the photoemission spectra due to electron correlations provides a theoretical challenge. The many-body perturbation theory yields a systematic way to study electron-electron (electron-phonon) correlations in various systems. One of the widely used approximations in MBPT is the GW approximation in which the bare interaction line is replaced with screened interaction line in the first order exchange diagram. The GW approximation gives good estimates for the band gap values close to experimental ones but especially the self-consistent GW approximation has a number of deficiencies like washing out of plasmon features and overestimation of bandwidths compared to experiment. One way to improve GW calculations is to include vertex corrections. Unfortunately, the straightforward inclusion of vertex corrections yields negative spectra in some frequency regions. We developed a diagrammatic approach to construct self-energy approximations with positive spectral properties. Our approach consists of expressing a self-energy of response diagram as a product of half-diagrams after which a minimal set of additional diagrams is identified to construct a perfect square. We applied this method to study vertex corrections in a homogeneous electron gas. In addition we analyzed the diagrammatic content of photocurrent with density functional theory. The expression for the photocurrent was obtained as an integral over the Kohn-Sham spectral function renormalized by effective potentials that depend on the exchange correlation kernel of current density functional theory. The expression for the photocurrent gives us the angular dependence of the photocurrent but it does not provide a direct access to the kinetic energy distribution of the photoelectrons.
The most of the experimental measurable quantities in many-body electron system, such as the optical absorption, luminescent spectra and exciton effect, are related to the excitation states description. The density functional theory with local density approximation (DFT-LDA) as a ground state theory, i.e. the solutions based on the Kohn-Sham equation is a powerful tool for studying the ground state properties in many-particle systems. However, the first principles computation of excited states is more complexity than ground-state calculations. A key problem is that the exchange-correlation interaction in excited states is differ from the ground-states. In recent years, nevertheless, several electronic-excitation theories have been developed. The most important theoretical and computational method include the many-body perturbation theory which is based on the quasi-particle concept and the Green function equation, the time-dependent DFT and the Bethe-Salpeter equation for describing the electron-hole interaction. Among them the central ingredient is an electron's self-energy operator Σ that describes the exchange correlation effect beyond Hartree approximation. The implementations of the above theories are unavoidable to introduce some of approximations. A good approximation for Σ is the GW approach by Hedin. It is shown from computation simulations for many real condensed matter systems that the GW approach is a successful method for electronic-excitation problems. Another effective method for excited-states is so-called screen-exchange local-density approximation (sX-LDA). It is a combination of LDA and Hartree-Fock (HF)theory, in which the intrinsic local screen-exchange interaction has been replaced by a non-local one and a generalized Kohn-Sham equation (GKS) is given. Based on a PWscf package, the sX-LDA-PWscf method has been tested and indicates that an available approach for treating band-gap problem in semiconductors. In this paper, the many-body theories for the excitation process, its development and signification are reviewed. The relation and differences consist in different theoretical methods are discussed. On the based of above discussions, the applications of many-body theory to the band-band transition (band-gap underestimation problem) and exciton effect in semiconductors are presented.