Strong energy–momentum dispersion of phonon-dressed carriers in the lightly doped band insulator SrTiO₃

Abstract

Much progress has been made recently in the study of the effects of electron-phonon (el-ph) coupling in doped insulators using angle resolved photoemission (ARPES), yielding evidence for the dominant role of el-ph interactions in underdoped cuprates. As these studies have been limited to doped Mott insulators, the important question arises how this compares with doped band insulators where similar el-ph couplings should be at work. The archetypical case is the perovskite SrTiO{sub 3} (STO), well known for its giant dielectric constant of 10000 at low temperature, exceeding that of La{sub 2}CuO{sub 4} by a factor of 500. Based on this fact, it has been suggested that doped STO should be the archetypical bipolaron superconductor. Here we report an ARPES study from high-quality surfaces of lightly doped SrTiO{sub 3}. Comparing to lightly doped Mott insulators, we find the signatures of only moderate electron-phonon coupling: a dispersion anomaly associated with the low frequency optical phonon with a {lambda}{prime} {approx} 0.3 and an overall bandwidth renormalization suggesting an overall {lambda}{prime} {approx} 0.7 coming from the higher frequency phonons. Further, we find no clear signatures of the large pseudogap or small polaron phenomena. These findings demonstrate that a large dielectric constant itself is not a good indicator of el-ph coupling and highlight the unusually strong effects of the el-ph coupling in doped Mott insulators.