Thermodynamic and spectral properties of adiabatic Peierls chains

Abstract

We present exact numerical results for the effects of thermal fluctuations on the experimentally relevant thermodynamic and spectral properties of Peierls chains. To this end, a combination of classical Monte Carlo sampling and exact diagonalization is used to study adiabatic half-filled Holstein and Su-Schrieffer-Heeger models. The classical nature of the lattice displacements in combination with parallel tempering permit simulations on large system sizes and a direct calculation of spectral functions in the frequency domain. Most notably, the long-range order and the associated Peierls gap give rise to a distinct low-temperature peak in the specific heat. The closing of the gap and suppression of order by thermal fluctuations involves in-gap excitations in the form of soliton-antisoliton pairs, and is also reflected in the dynamic density and bond structure factors as well as in the optical conductivity. We compare our data to the widely used mean-field approximation, and highlight relations to symmetry-protected topological phases and disorder problems.

12 pages, 11 figures, final version

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• Excitation spectra and correlation functions of quantum Su-Schrieffer-Heeger models
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Cited by in corpus (6)

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• Thermal and quantum lattice fluctuations in Peierls chains
• Real-time evolution of static electron-phonon models in time-dependent electric fields
• Thermal and optical conductivity in the Holstein model at half filling and at finite temperature in the Luttinger-liquid and charge-density-wave regime
• Electronic Mechanism that Quenches Field-Driven Heating as Illustrated with the Static Holstein Model
• Grand-canonical Peierls theory for atomic wires on substrates