We study Holstein polarons in three-dimensional anisotropic materials. Using a variational exact diagonalization technique we provide highly accurate results for the polaron mass and polaron radius. With these data we discuss the differences between polaron formation in dimension one and three, and at small and large phonon frequency. Varying the anisotropy we demonstrate how a polaron evolves from a one-dimensional to a three-dimensional quasiparticle. We thereby resolve the issue of polaron stability in quasi-one-dimensional substances and clarify to what extent such polarons can be described as one-dimensional objects. We finally show that even the local Holstein interaction leads to an enhancement of anisotropy in charge carrier motion.
In the context of the Holstein polaron problem it is shown that the dynamical mean field theory (DMFT) corresponds to the summation of a special class of local diagrams in the skeleton expansion of the self-energy. In the real space representation, these local diagrams are characterized by the absence of vertex corrections involving phonons at different lattice sites. Such corrections vanish in the limit of infinite dimensions, for which the DMFT provides the exact solution of the Holstein polaron problem. However, for finite dimensional systems the accuracy of the DMFT is limited. In particular, it cannot describe correctly the adiabatic spreading of the polaron over multiple lattice sites. Arguments are given that the DMFT limitations on vertex corrections found for the Holstein polaron problem persist for finite electron densities and arbitrary phonon dispersion.
We show that, by an appropriate choice of auxiliary fields and exact integration of the phonon degrees of freedom, it is possible to define a sign-free path integral for the so called Hubbard-Holstein model at half-filling. We use a statistical method, based on an accelerated and efficient Langevin dynamics, for evaluating all relevant correlation functions of the model. Preliminary calculations at $U/t=4$ and $U/t=1$, for $omega_0/t=1$, indicate a quite extended region around $U simeq {g^2 over omega_0}$ without either antiferromagnetic or charge-density-wave orders, separating two quantum critical points at zero temperature. The elimination of the sign problem in a model without explicit particle-hole symmetry may open new perspectives for strongly correlated models, even away from the purely attractive or particle-hole symmetric cases.
We utilize an exact variational numerical procedure to calculate the ground state properties of a polaron in the presence of a Rashba-like spin orbit interaction. Our results corroborate with previous work performed with the Momentum Average approximation and with weak coupling perturbation theory. We find that spin orbit coupling increases the effective mass in the regime with weak electron phonon coupling, and decreases the effective mass in the intermediate and strong electron phonon coupling regime. Analytical strong coupling perturbation theory results confirm our numerical results in the small polaron regime. A large amount of spin orbit coupling can lead to a significant lowering of the polaron effective mass.
The behavior of the 1D Holstein polaron is described, with emphasis on lattice coarsening effects, by distinguishing between adiabatic and nonadiabatic contributions to the local correlations and dispersion properties. The original and unifying systematization of the crossovers between the different polaron behaviors, usually considered in the literature, is obtained in terms of quantum to classical, weak coupling to strong coupling, adiabatic to nonadiabatic, itinerant to self-trapped polarons and large to small polarons. It is argued that the relationship between various aspects of polaron states can be specified by five regimes: the weak-coupling regime, the regime of large adiabatic polarons, the regime of small adiabatic polarons, the regime of small nonadiabatic (Lang-Firsov) polarons, and the transitory regime of small pinned polarons for which the adiabatic and nonadiabatic contributions are inextricably mixed in the polaron dispersion properties. The crossovers between these five regimes are positioned in the parameter space of the Holstein Hamiltonian.
The eigenstate thermalization hypothesis (ETH) is a successful theory that provides sufficient criteria for ergodicity in quantum many-body systems. Most studies were carried out for Hamiltonians relevant for ultracold quantum gases and single-component systems of spins, fermions, or bosons. The paradigmatic example for thermalization in solid-state physics are phonons serving as a bath for electrons. This situation is often viewed from an open-quantum system perspective. Here, we ask whether a minimal microscopic model for electron-phonon coupling is quantum chaotic and whether it obeys ETH, if viewed as a closed quantum system. Using exact diagonalization, we address this question in the framework of the Holstein polaron model. Even though the model describes only a single itinerant electron, whose coupling to dispersionless phonons is the only integrability-breaking term, we find that the spectral statistics and the structure of Hamiltonian eigenstates exhibit essential properties of the corresponding random-matrix ensemble. Moreover, we verify the ETH ansatz both for diagonal and offdiagonal matrix elements of typical phonon and electron observables, and show that the ratio of their variances equals the value predicted from random-matrix theory.