Intermittent polaron dynamics: Born-Oppenheimer out of equilibrium

Abstract

We consider the non-equilibrium dynamics of a molecular level interacting with local phonon modes in the case of a strong polaronic shift which prevents a perturbative treatment of the problem. Instead, we find that in an adiabatic regime when the electronic states react faster than the phonon modes it is possible to provide a fully non-perturbative treatment of the phonon dynamics including random noise and dissipation. The result shows intermittent switching between bistable states of the oscillator with an effective random telegraph noise.