Coexistence of excited polarons and metastable delocalized states in photo-induced metals

Abstract

We study how polaronic states form as a function of time due to strong electron-phonon coupling, starting from a hot electron distribution which is representative of a photo-induced metallic state immediately after laser excitation. For this purpose we provide the exact solution of the single-electron Holstein model within nonequilibrium dynamical mean-field theory. In particular, this allows us to reveal key features of the transient metallic state in the numerically most challenging regime, the adiabatic regime, in which phonon frequencies are smaller than the electronic bandwidth: Initial coherent phonon oscillations are strongly damped, leaving the system in a mixture of excited polaron states and metastable delocalized states. We compute the time-resolved photoemission spectrum, which allows to disentangle two contributions. The existence of long-lived delocalized states suggest ways to externally control transient properties of photo-doped metals.

14 pages, 7 figures

References in corpus (9)

• Theoretical description of time-resolved photoemission spectroscopy: application to pump-probe experiments
• Green's function of a dressed particle
• The Green's Function of the Holstein Polaron
• Relaxation dynamics of the Holstein polaron
• Nonequilibrium dynamics of the Holstein polaron driven by external electric field
• Witnessing the formation and relaxation of massive quasi-particles in a strongly correlated electron system
• Real-time decay of a highly excited charge carrier in the one-dimensional Holstein model
• Field-induced polaron formation in the Holstein-Hubbard model
• Quantum simulation of small-polaron formation with trapped ions

Cited by in corpus (9)

• Real-time decay of a highly excited charge carrier in the one-dimensional Holstein model
• Charge-density-wave melting in the one-dimensional Holstein model
• Finite-temperature density-matrix renormalization group method for electron-phonon systems: Thermodynamics and Holstein-polaron spectral functions
• Time-linear scaling NEGF methods for real-time simulations of interacting electrons and bosons. II. Dynamics of polarons and doublons
• Quantum dynamics of the small-polaron formation in a superconducting analog simulator
• Dynamical control of electron-phonon interactions with high-frequency light
• Nature of Bosonic Excitations revealed by high-energy charge carriers
• Scattering of an electronic wave packet by a one-dimensional electron-phonon-coupled structure
• Energy flow during relaxation in an electron-phonon system with multiple modes: A nonequilibrium Green's function study