Optical self-energy in graphene due to correlations

In highly correlated systems one can define an optical self-energy in analogy to its quasiparticle (QP) self-energy counterpart. This quantity provides useful information on the nature of the excitations involved in inelastic scattering processes. Here we calculate the self-energy of the intraband optical transitions in graphene originating in the electron-electron interaction (EEI) as well as electron-phonon interaction (EPI). Although optics involves an average over all momenta (k) of the charge carriers, the structure in the optical self-energy is nevertheless found to mirror mainly that of the corresponding quasiparticles for k equal to or near the Fermi momentum k(F). Consequently, plasmaronic structures which are associated with momenta near the Dirac point at k = 0 are not important in the intraband optical response. While the structure of the electron-phonon interaction (EPI) reflects the sharp peaks of the phonon density of states, the excitation spectrum associated with the electron-electron interaction is in comparison structureless and flat and extends over an energy range which scales linearly with the value of the chemical potential. We introduce a method whereby detailed quantitative information on such excitation spectra can be extracted from optical data. Modulations seen on the edge of the interband optical conductivity as it rises towards its universal background value are traced to structure in the quasiparticle self-energies around k(F) of the lower Dirac cone associated with the occupied states.     

Superfluid nuclear matter in BCS theory and beyond

Medium polarization eflects are studied for 1S0 pairing in nuclear matter within BHF approach. The screening potential is calculated in the RPA limit, suitably renormalized to cure the low density mechanical instability of nuclear matter. The self-energy corrections are consistently included resulting in a strong depletion of the Fermi surface. The self-energy effects always lead to a quenching of the gap, whereas it is almost completely compensated by the anti-screening effect in nuclear matter.     

Superfluid nuclear matter in BCS theory and beyond

Medium polarization effects are studied for ¹S₀ pairing in nuclear matter within BHF approach. The screening potential is calculated in the RPA limit, suitably renormalized to cure the low density mechanical instability of nuclear matter. The self-energy corrections are consistently included resulting in a strong     

Optical sum rule in metals with strong electron-phonon interaction

The properties of a superconductor featuring strong electron-phonon and electron-impurity interactions have been studied in a single-band approximation. It is shown that the elastic scattering of electrons on static impurities decreases the electron-phonon interaction constant in proportion to the ratio of the electron-impurity relaxation rate and the seeding band width. The optical spectral weight (integral of the real part of the optical conductivity) in various energy intervals of a metal in the normal and superconducting states has been calculated as a function of the temperature and the superconducting gap. In the region of large (compared to the phonon) energies, the dependence of the spectral weight on the superconducting gap is weak, while the dependence on the temperature is completely determined by the corresponding dependence of the relaxation rate due to the elastic electron-phonon scattering far from the Fermi surface. It is shown that a difference in behavior of the spectral weight between the normal and superconducting states at lower energies is determined by so-called Holstein’s shift of the feature in the optical conductivity spectrum (rather than by the gap width, as it is commonly believed) and sharply decreases upon the introduction of impurities.     

Non-fermi liquid and pairing in electron-doped cuprates

We study the normal state and pairing instability in electron-doped cuprates in a model with long-ranged antiferromagnetic spin fluctuations close to an antiferromagnetic quantum-critical point. We show that the fermionic self-energy has a non-Fermi-liquid form leading to peculiar frequency dependencies of the conductivity and the Raman response. We solve the pairing problem and demonstrate that T(c) is determined by the curvature of the Fermi surface, and the pairing gap delta (kappa, omega) is strongly nonmonotonic along the Fermi surface. The normal state frequency dependencies, the value of T(c) is approximately 10 K, and the kappa dependence of the gap agree with the experiment.     

Renormalization group and Fermi liquid theory

We give a Hamiltonian-based interpretation of microscopic Fermi liquid theory within a renormalization group framework. The Fermi liquid fixed-point Hamiltonian with its leading-order corrections is identified and we show that the mean field calculations for this model correspond to the Landau phenomenological approach. This is illustrated first of all for the Kondo and Anderson models of magnetic impurities which display Fermi liquid behaviour at low temperatures. We then show how these results can be deduced by a reorganization of perturbation theory, in close parallel to that for the renormalized φ⁴ field theory. The Fermi liquid results follow from the two lowest order diagrams of the renormalized perturbation expansion. The calculations for the impurity models are simpler than for the general case because the self-energy depends on frequency only. We show, however, that a similar renormalized expansion can be derived also for the case of a translationally invariant system. The parameters specifying the Fermi liquid fixed-point Hamiltonian are related to the renormalized vertices appearing in the perturbation theory. The collective zero sound modes appear in the quasiparticle-quasihole ladder sum of the renormalized perturbation expansion. The renormalized perturbation expansion can in principle be used beyond the Fermi liquid regime to higher temperatures. This approach should be particularly useful for heavy fermions and other strongly correlated electron systems, where the renormalization of the single-particle excitations are particularly large.

We briefly look at the breakdown of Fermi liquid theory from a renormalized perturbation theory point of view. We show how a modified version of the approach can be used in some situations, such as the spinless Luttinger model, where Fermi liquid theory is not applicable. Other examples of systems where the Fermi liquid theory breaks down are also briefly discussed.     

Renormalized cluster expansion for multiple scattering in disordered systems

We study wave propagation in a disordered system of scatterers and derive a renormalized cluster expansion for the optical potential or self-energy of the average wave. We show that in the problem of multiple scattering a repetitive structure of Ornstein-Zernike type may be detected. We derive exact expressions for two elementary constituents of the renormalized scattering series, called the reaction field operator and the short-range connector. These expressions involve sums of integrals of a product of a chain correlation function and a nodal connector. We expect that approximate calculation of the reaction field operator and the short-range connector allows one to find a good approximation to the self-energy, even for high density of scatterers. The theory applies to a wide variety of systems.     

Chirality-induced dynamic kohn anomalies in graphene

We develop a theory for the renormalization of the phonon energy dispersion in graphene due to the combined effects of both Coulomb and electron-phonon (e-ph) interactions. We obtain the renormalized phonon energy spectrum by an exact analytic derivation of the phonon self-energy, finding three distinct Kohn anomalies (KAs) at the phonon wave vector q=omega/v, 2k_{F}+/-omega/v for LO phonons and one at q=omega/v for TO phonons. The presence of these new KAs in graphene, in contrast to the usual KA q=2k_{F} in ordinary metals, originates from the dynamical screening of e-ph interaction (with a concomitant breakdown of the Born-Oppenheimer approximation) and the peculiar chirality of the graphene e-ph coupling.     

Two-site model for a small polaron: Mass renormalization and optical conductivity

The renormalization of the mass of an electron interacting with many ions of a lattice via the long-range (Fröhlich) electron-phonon interaction and optical absorption of electrons are studied at zero temperature. Ions are assumed to be isotropic three-dimensional oscillators. The optical conductivity and the renormalized mass of small adiabatic Fröhlich polarons are calculated and compared with those of small adiabatic Holstein polarons.     

Electron-phonon interaction at the Be(0001) surface

We present a first principle study of the electron-phonon (e-p) interaction at the Be(0001) surface. The real and imaginary parts of the e-p self-energy (Sigma) are calculated for the Gamma; surface state in the binding energy range from the Gamma; point to the Fermi level. Our calculation shows an overall good agreement with several photoemission data measured at high and low temperatures. Additionally, we show that the energy derivative of Re Sigma presents a strong temperature and energy variation close to E(F), making it difficult to measure its value just at E(F).     

Impurity Effects at Surfaces of a Photon-Dressed Bi_2Se_3 Thin Film

We investigate the impurity effects on surfaces of a thin film topological insulator, applied by an off-resonant circular polarized light. It is found that the off-resonant driving induces a quantized total Hall conductivity, when the driving strength is larger than a critical value and the Fermi level lies in the band gap, indicating that our system is converted into the topological phase. We also find that with the increasing disorder strength, the Dirac masses of top and bottom surfaces are renormalized and then fixed to half of their initial values, respectively,which will shrink the widths of the half-integer plateau of anomalous Hall conductivities.     

Effect of gap opening on the quasiparticle properties of doped graphene sheets

We present numerical calculations of the effect of gap opening on the quasiparticle properties of a doped graphene sheet within G₀W-RPA approximation. We present results of the renormalized Fermi velocity suppression and the renormalization constant over a broad range of the energy gap values. We find that the renormalized velocity is density independent at large density values which is in agreement with recent experimental observations. We also show that the inelastic quasiparticle lifetime decreases by increasing the gap value. Finally, we show that the inelastic mean free path reduces by increasing the gap values but in the range of the typical gap values it is large enough and transport remains in the semi-ballistic regime.     

Temperature dependence of the energy GAP in GaAs

It is shown that electron-phonon self-energy effects are as important as the Debye-Waller screening of the pseudopotential in the temperature dependence of the band gap when the valence band is degenerate.     

Phonon-induced many-body renormalization of the electronic properties of graphene

We develop a theory for the electron-phonon interaction effects on the electronic properties of graphene. We analytically calculate the electron self-energy, spectral function, and the band velocity renormalization due to phonon-mediated electron-electron interaction, finding that phonon-mediated electron-electron coupling has a large effect on the graphene band structure renormalization. Our analytic theory successfully captures the essential features of the observed graphene electron spectra in the angle-resolved photoemission experiments, predicting a kink at approximately 200 meV below the Fermi level and a reduction of the band velocity by approximately 10-20% at the experimental doping level.     

The influence of many-body interactions on the de Haas-van Alphen effect

The de Haas-van Alphen (dHvA) effect, or Landau quantum oscillatory magnetization of metals, has been widely used to explore the single-particle aspects of electrons in metals with the aim of determining their Fermi surfaces. Its role in studying many-body effects in metals is less familiar, even though the influence of such interactions is well known. We present a general field-theoretic approach to this problem which shows that the paradigm for understanding the influence of many-body interactions in the dHvA effect should be shifted from the intuitively reasonable but potentially misleading arguments based on the electron self-energy on the real energy axis to an analysis of the self-energy along the imaginary energy axis. When viewed in this way, the dHvA effect assumes the role of a many-body self-energy filter in which the real part of the self-energy renormalizes the dHvA frequency while the imaginary part renormalizes independently the dHvA amplitude. We obtain a general theory for the dHvA effect in an interacting system which preserves the structure of the original non-interacting theory of Lifshitz and Kosevich. We then apply this extended Lifshitz-Kosevich theory to the analysis of several problems of interest, including electron-electron and electron-phonon interactions, heavy fermions and type II superconductors.     

Spin-Hall conductivity in electron-phonon coupled systems

We derive the ac spin-Hall conductivity sigmasH(omega) of two-dimensional spin-orbit coupled systems interacting with dispersionless phonons of frequency omega0. For the linear Rashba model, we show that the electron-phonon contribution to the spin-vertex corrections breaks the universality of sigmasH(omega) at low frequencies and provides a nontrivial renormalization of the interband resonance. On the contrary, in a generalized Rashba model for which the spin-vertex contributions are absent, the coupling to the phonons enters only through the self-energy, leaving the low-frequency behavior of sigmasH(omega) unaffected by the electron-phonon interaction.     

The effects of the magnetopolaron on the energy gap opening in graphene

The magnetopolaron is formed via electron-acoustic deformation phonon coupling in the presence of a magnetic field in monolayer graphene. We find that an energy gap (EG) is opened due to the electron-phonon coupling. Both linear and square-root forms for the dependence of the EG on the magnetic field are obtained, which are in agreement with experimental measurements. Furthermore, we suggest that the EG can be estimated through observing the variation of Fermi velocity in cyclotron resonance experiments. The relation of the EG with the Debye cut-off wavenumber is also discussed.     

Quasiparticle lifetime in graphite studied by ultrahigh-resolution ARPES

We have performed ultrahigh-resolution angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy (ARPES) to elucidate the nature of quasiparticle dynamics in graphite. We found fairly sharp quasiparticle peak of π band around K(H) point in the vicinity of the Fermi level, together with the strong mass renormalization of the band (kink). The imaginary part of electron self-energy (ImΣ) shows a sudden drop below 0.18 eV, indicative of a strong electron-phonon coupling. The linear energy dependence of ImΣ at higher binding energies provides an evidence for the deviation from the conventional Fermi liquid theory.