Electron-Phonon Interaction in Metals

Abstract

The role of electron-electron interactions in determining the electron-phonon interaction in metals is investigated by extending the Bohm-Pines collective description to take into account the ionic motion. Collective coordinates are introduced to describe the long-range electron-ionic correlations, and it is shown by a series of canonical transformations that these give rise to plasma waves and to coupled electron-ion waves which correspond to longitudinal sound waves. The dispersion relation for the sound waves is identical with that derived by Toya and Nakajima by self-consistent field methods. The velocity of these sound waves is calculated from first principles for sodium and is found to be in good agreement with experiment. The effective matrix element for the electron-phonon interaction is determined and is found to be identical for long wavelengths with that found earlier by Bardeen using a self-consistent field method which neglects exchange and correlation effects. The agreement with the earlier work is explained by the fact that the residual electron-electron interaction is of quite short range, so that an independent-particle treatment is rather well justified. The effects of Coulomb correlations on superconductivity are likewise shown to be small, so that the neglect of Coulomb interactions in the formulation of the superconductivity problem is justified.