Anderson localization in strongly coupled disordered electron-phonon systems

TL;DR

This paper uses a probabilistic dynamical mean field approach to study how strong electron-phonon interactions and disorder influence polaron formation and Anderson localization, revealing the localization behavior across different parameters.

Contribution

It introduces a statistical dynamical mean field method to analyze the interplay between polaron formation and Anderson localization in disordered electron-phonon systems.

Findings

Identification of mobility edges from local Green function distributions

Analysis of localization properties as a function of polaron parameters

Comparison of polaron localization with bare electron case

Abstract

Based on the statistical dynamical mean field theory, we investigate, in a generic model for a strongly coupled disordered electron-phonon system, the competition between polaron formation and Anderson localization. The statistical dynamical mean field approximation maps the lattice problem to an ensemble of self-consistently embedded impurity problems. It is a probabilistic approach, focusing on the distribution instead of the average values for observables of interest. We solve the self-consistent equations of the theory with a Monte-Carlo sampling technique, representing distributions for random variables by random samples, and discuss various ways to determine mobility edges from the random sample for the local Green function. Specifically, we give, as a function of the `polaron parameters', such as adiabaticity and electron-phonon coupling constants, a detailed discussion of the localization properties of a single polaron, using a bare electron as a reference system.