Dynamical mean-field theory of the small polaron

Abstract

A dynamical mean-field theory of the small polaron problem is presented, which becomes exact in the limit of infinite dimensions. The ground-state properties and the one-electron spectral function are obtained for a single electron interacting with Einstein phonons by a mapping of the lattice problem onto a polaronic impurity model. The one-electron propagator of the impurity model is calculated through a continued fraction expansion, at both zero and finite temperature, for any electron-phonon coupling and phonon energy. In contrast to the ground-state properties, such as the effective polaron mass, which show a continuous behavior as the coupling is increased, spectral properties exhibit a sharp qualitative change at low enough phonon frequency: beyond a critical coupling, one energy gap and then more open in the density of states at low energy, while the high-energy part of the spectrum is broad and can be qualitatively explained by a strong coupling adiabatic approximation. As a consequence, narrow and coherent low-energy subbands coexist with an incoherent featureless structure at high energy. The subbands denote the formation of quasiparticle polaron states. Also, divergencies of the self-energy may occur in the gaps. At finite temperature such an effect triggers an important damping and broadening of the polaron subbands. On the other hand, in the large phonon frequency regime such a separation of energy scales does not exist and the spectrum always has a multipeaked structure.