5 research outputs found
Conductivity of CuO-Chains: Disorder versus Electron-Phonon Coupling
The optical conductivity of the CuO-chains, a subsystem of the 1-2-3
materials, is dominated by a broad peak in the mid-infrared (eV), and a slowly falling high-frequency tail. The 1D --model is
proposed as the relevant low-energy Hamiltonian describing the intrinsic
electronic structure of the CuO-chains. However, due to charge-spin
decoupling, this model alone cannot reproduce the observed \sw. We consider
two additional scattering mechanisms: (i) Disregarding the not so crucial spin
degrees of freedom, the inclusion of strong potential disorder yields excellent
agreement with experiment, but suffers from the unreasonable value of the
disorder strength necessary for the fit. (ii) Moderately strong polaronic
electron-phonon coupling to the mode involving Cu(1)-O(4) stretching, can be
modeled within a 1D Holstein Hamiltonian of spinless fermions. Using a
variational approximation for the phonon Hilbert space, we diagonalize the
Hamiltonian exactly on finite lattices. As a result of the experimental hole
density , the chains can exhibit strong charge-density-wave (CDW)
correlations, driven by phonon-mediated polaron-polaron interactions. In the
vicinity of half filling, charge motion is identified as arising from moving
domain walls, \ie defects in the CDW. Incorporating the effect of vacancy
disorder by choosing open boundary conditions, good agreement with the
experimental spectra is found. In particular, a high-frequency tail arises as a
consequence of the polaron-polaron interactions.Comment: 42 pages, ETH-TH/93-31 (Postscript