No Arabic abstract
The time-convolutionless master equation for the electronic populations is derived for a generic electron-phonon Hamiltonian. The equation can be used in the regimes where the golden rule approach is not applicable. The equation is applied to study the electronic relaxation in several models with the finite number normal modes. For such mesoscopic systems the relaxation behavior differs substantially from the simple exponential relaxation. In particular, the equation shows the appearance of the recurrence phenomena on a time-scale determined by the slowest mode of the system. The formal results are quite general and can be used for a wide range of physical systems. Numerical results are presented for a two level system coupled to Ohmic and super-Ohmic baths, as well as for a model of charge-transfer dynamics between semiconducting organic polymers.
We present here a brief overview of our work in developing a convolutionless quantum master equation approach suitable for mesoscopic sized systems. Our final equation can be used in the regimes where the golden rule approach is not applicable. Here we apply the approach to study the electronic relaxation in several models with the finite number of normal modes. For such mesoscopic systems the relaxation behavior differs substantially from the simple exponential relaxation. In particular, the equation shows the appearance of the recurrence phenomena on a time-scale determined by the slowest mode of the system. The formal results are quite general and can be used for a wide range of physical systems. Numerical results are presented for a two level system coupled to an Ohmic and super-Ohmic baths, as well as for a model of charge-transfer dynamics between semiconducting organic polymers. In this later system, we show how both slow and fast phonon modes contribute to the decay of an exciton across a heterojunction interface.
Electron-phonon ($e$-ph) interactions are pervasive in condensed matter, governing phenomena such as transport, superconductivity, charge-density waves, polarons and metal-insulator transitions. First-principles approaches enable accurate calculations of $e$-ph interactions in a wide range of solids. However, they remain an open challenge in correlated electron systems (CES), where density functional theory often fails to describe the ground state. Therefore reliable $e$-ph calculations remain out of reach for many transition metal oxides, high-temperature superconductors, Mott insulators, planetary materials and multiferroics. Here we show first-principles calculations of $e$-ph interactions in CES, using the framework of Hubbard-corrected density functional theory (DFT+$U$ ) and its linear response extension (DFPT+$U$), which can describe the electronic structure and lattice dynamics of many CES. We showcase the accuracy of this approach for a prototypical Mott system, CoO, carrying out a detailed investigation of its $e$-ph interactions and electron spectral functions. While standard DFPT gives unphysically divergent and short-ranged $e$-ph interactions, DFPT+$U$ is shown to remove the divergences and properly account for the long-range Frohlich interaction, allowing us to model polaron effects in a Mott insulator. Our work establishes a broadly applicable and affordable approach for quantitative studies of e-ph interactions in CES, a novel theoretical tool to interpret experiments in this broad class of materials.
We present a method to efficiently combine the computation of electron-electron and electron-phonon self-energies, which enables the evaluation of electron-phonon coupling at the $G_0W_0$ level of theory for systems with hundreds of atoms. In addition, our approach, which is a generalization of a method recently proposed for molecules [J. Chem. Theory Comput. 2018, 14, 6269-6275], enables the inclusion of non-adiabatic and temperature effects at no additional computational cost. We present results for diamond and defects in diamond and discuss the importance of numerically accurate $G_0W_0$ band structures to obtain robust predictions of zero point renormalization (ZPR) of band gaps, and of the inclusion of non-adiabatic effect to accurately compute the ZPR of defect states in the band gap.
Time and angular resolved photoelectron spectroscopy is a powerful technique to measure electron dynamics in solids. Recent advances in this technique have facilitated band and energy resolved observations of the effect that excited phonons, have on the electronic structure. Here, we show with the help of textit{ab initio} simulations that the Fourier analysis of time-resolved measurements of solids with excited phonon modes leads, in fact, to an observation of the band- and mode-resolved electron-phonon coupling directly from the experimental data and without need for theoretical computations.
Density functional theory is generalized to incorporate electron-phonon coupling. A Kohn-Sham equation yielding the electronic density $n_U(mathbf{r})$, a conditional probability density depending parametrically on the phonon normal mode amplitudes $U={U_{mathbf{q}lambda}}$, is coupled to the nuclear Schrodinger equation of the exact factorization method. The phonon modes are defined from the harmonic expansion of the nuclear Schrodinger equation. A nonzero Berry curvature on nuclear configuration space affects the phonon modes, showing that the potential energy surface alone is generally not sufficient to define the phonons. An orbital-dependent functional approximation for the non-adiabatic exchange-correlation energy reproduces the leading-order nonadiabatic electron-phonon-induced band structure renormalization in the Frohlich model.