No Arabic abstract
The Allen-Heine-Cardona theory allows us to calculate phonon-induced electron self-energies from first principles without resorting to the adiabatic approximation. However, this theory has not been able to account for the change of the electron wave function, which is crucial if interband energy differences are comparable to the phonon-induced electron self-energy as in temperature-driven topological transitions. Furthermore, for materials without inversion symmetry, even the existence of such topological transitions cannot be investigated using the Allen-Heine-Cardona theory. Here, we generalize this theory to the renormalization of both the electron energies and wave functions. Our theory can describe both the diagonal and off-diagonal components of the Debye-Waller self-energy in a simple, unified framework. For demonstration, we calculate the electron-phonon coupling contribution to the temperature-dependent band structure and hidden spin polarization of BiTlSe2 across a topological transition. These quantities can be directly measured. Our theory opens a door for studying temperature-induced topological phase transitions in materials both with and without inversion symmetry.
We present a first-principles investigation of the phonon-induced electron self-energy in graphene. The energy dependence of the self-energy reflects the peculiar linear bandstructure of graphene and deviates substantially from the usual metallic behavior. The effective band velocity of the Dirac fermions is found to be reduced by 4-8%, depending on doping, by the interaction with lattice vibrations. Our results are consistent with the observed linear dependence of the electronic linewidth on the binding energy in photoemission spectra.
We report phonon renormalization induced by an external electric field E in ferroelectric poly(vinylidene fluoride-trifluoroethylene) [P(VDF-TrFE)] nanofibers through measuring the E-dependent thermal conductivity. Our experimental results are in excellent agreement with the theoretical ones derived from the lattice dynamics. The renormalization is attributed to the anharmonicity that modifies the phonon spectrum when the atoms are pulled away from their equilibrium positions by the electric field. Our finding provides an efficient way to manipulate the thermal conductivity by tuning external fields in ferroelectric materials.
We report the direct observation of a resonance mode in the lowest-energy optic phonon very near the zone center around (111) in the multiferroic BiFeO$_3$ using neutron scattering methods. The phonon scattering intensity is enhanced when antiferromagnetic (AFM) order sets in at T$_N = 640$~K, and it increases on cooling. This resonance is confined to a very narrow region in energy-momentum space where no spin-wave excitation intensity is expected, and it can be modified by an external magnetic field. Our results suggest the existence of a novel coupling between the lattice and spin fluctuations in this multiferroic system in which the spin-wave excitations are mapped onto the lattice vibrations via the Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya (DM) interaction.
We present an ab-initio density-functional-theory approach for calculating electron-phonon interactions within the projector augmented-wave method. The required electron-phonon matrix elements are defined as the second derivative of the one-electron energies in the PAW method. As the PAW method leads to a generalized eigenvalue problem, the resulting electron-phonon matrix elements lack some symmetries that are usually present for simple eigenvalue problems and all-electron formulations. We discuss the relation between our definition of the electron-phonon matrix element and other formulations. To allow for efficient evaluation of physical properties, we introduce a Wannier-interpolation scheme, again adapted to generalized eigenvalue problems. To explore the methods numerical characteristics, the temperature-dependent band-gap renormalization of diamond is calculated and compared with previous publications. Furthermore, we apply the method to selected binary compounds and show that the obtained zero-point renormalizations agree well with other values found in literature and experiments.
Quantum Monte Carlo simulations of interacting electrons in solids often use Slater-Jastrow trial wave functions with Jastrow factors containing one- and two-body terms. In uniform systems the long-range behavior of the two-body term may be deduced from the random-phase approximation (RPA) of Bohm and Pines. Here we generalize the RPA to nonuniform systems. This gives the long-range behavior of the inhomogeneous two-body correlation term and provides an accurate analytic expression for the one-body term. It also explains why Slater-Jastrow trial wave functions incorporating determinants of Hartree-Fock or density-functional orbitals are close to optimal even in the presence of an RPA Jastrow factor. After adjusting the inhomogeneous RPA Jastrow factor to incorporate the known short-range behavior, we test it using variational Monte Carlo calculations. We find that the most important aspect of the two-body term is the short-range behavior due to electron-electron scattering, although the long-range behavior described by the RPA should become more important at high densities.