Thursday,
October 16, 2008 - 4:00 P.M., NSH 184
Because of attraction between electrons and the atoms that make up a crystal, each electron is surrounded by a lattice distortion, or a cloud of phonons (phonons are lattice vibrations) as it moves through the crystal. This composite object, the electron plus its surrounding phonon cloud, is called a polaron. I will discuss ways to calculate polaron properties, focusing on understanding how they evolve when the electron-phonon interaction increases from the very weak to the very strong regime.