Erratum: Exact Ground State Energy of the Strong-Coupling Polaron

TL;DR

This paper provides a straightforward, rigorous derivation of the asymptotic ground state energy of the strong-coupling polaron, including explicit error bounds, improving upon previous complex proofs and applicable to related models.

Contribution

It introduces a simple, rigorous method to derive the asymptotic ground state energy of the polaron with explicit error bounds, applicable to various polaron models.

Findings

Derived the asymptotic ground state energy with explicit error bounds.

Provided a simpler alternative to previous complex proofs.

Extended applicability to other polaron models.

Abstract

The polaron has been of interest in condensed matter theory and field theory for about half a century, especially the limit of large coupling constant. It was not until 1983, however, that a proof of the asymptotic formula for the ground state energy was finally given by using difficult arguments involving the large deviation theory of path integrals. Here we derive the same asymptotic result and with explicit error bounds, by simple, rigorous methods applied directly to the Hamiltonian. Our method is easily generalizable to other settings, e.g., the excitonic and magnetic polarons. This version of the article includes an erratum concerning the ultra-violet bound given in the published article. The erratum is to appear in the same journal.