Abstract

Motivated by aspects of layered high-temperature superconductors and related quasi-one-dimensional materials, we consider polaron structure, dynamics, and coherence in certain extended Peierls–Hubbard models. We emphasize the qualitative importance of electron–lattice interactions even in the presence of dominant electron–electron correlations, the signatures of polaron structure and dynamics in energy-resolved pair-distribution structure functions, and the effect of disorder on polaron propagation and stability.

Introduction

The formation and dynamics of polarons (and bipolarons), despite a halfcentury of theoretical and experimental study, remain fascinating topics in many-body physics, combining as they do (often competing) aspects of coupled fields with distinct natural time scales (e.g., electron–phonon, spin–phonon, exciton–phonon), electron–electron interactions, lattice discreteness, nonadiabaticity, collective quantum tunneling, thermal fluctuations, competitions between disorder and polaronic localization, etc. Direct observation of polarons through real-space imaging of any of the coupled fields is rare even with the advent of STEM, AFM techniques, etc. Likewise, global measurements such as that of electronic band-structure are insensitive to polaron features. Thus, experiments and theoretical techniques have had to focus on indirect effects on microscopic probes such as transport coefficients, electronic absorption, vibrational spectroscopy, and so forth.

Our purpose here is to briefly review three qualitative effects in polaron physics that have arisen in modeling two components of the lattice structure of the layered cuprate superconductors [1] – namely, extended multi-band Peierls–Hubbard models of (a) the active CuO2 planes and (b) polarizable Cu–O clusters in the axial direction (polarizable interplanar medium).