Signatures of polaron formation in systems with local and non-local electron-phonon couplings

Polaron formation is investigated in a one-dimensional chain by taking into account both the local Holstein and the non-local SSH electron-phonon interactions. The study of the adiabatic regime points out that the combined effects of the two interactions are important mainly in the weak coupling regime. Thus, using the weak-coupling perturbation theory, spectral weights, effective masses, polaronic phase-diagram, and band structures are discussed. Contrarily to what happens in the Fröhlich and Holstein models, we find that the ratio between the coherent spectral weight and the mass renormalization ratio is greater than 1. Moreover, we show that the non-local electron-phonon interaction is responsible for the largest deviations of the band structure from the cosine shape of the free energy band.