CHAPTER 14: PLASMONS,

POLARITONS, AND
POLARONS
LLANO GUERRERO ANAHI ELIZABETH.
2033976

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DIELECTRIC FUNCTION OF THE ELECTRON GAS

• The dielectric function (,K) of the electron gas, with its strong dependence on frequency and
wavevector, has significant consequences for the physical properties of solids.
• The dielectric constant of electrostatics is defined in terms of the electric field E and the polarization
P, the dipole moment density:
• Thus defined, is also known as the relative permittivity

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 PLASMA OPTICS:
• The long wavelength dielectric response (,0) or () of an electron gas is obtained from the equation of motion of a free
electron in an electric field:

• A plasma is a medium with equal concentration of positive and negative charges, of which at least one charge type is
mobile. In a solid the negative charges of the conduction electrons are balanced by an equal concentration of positive
charge of the ion cores. We write the dielectric function:

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DISPERSION RELATION FOR
ELECTROMAGNETIC WAVES

In a nonmagnetic isotropic medium the electromagnetic wave equation

is

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TRANSVERSE OPTICAL MODES IN A PLASMA

• this describes transverse

electromagnetic waves in a plasma

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TRANSPARENCY OF METALS IN THE
ULTRAVIOLET.
• that simple metals should reflect light in the visible region and be transparent
to light at high frequencies.
• The reflection of light from a metal is entirely similar to the reflection of radio
waves from the ionosphere, for the free electrons in the ionosphere make the
dielectric constant negative at low frequencies.

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LONGITUDINAL PLASMA OSCILLATIONS

• The zeros of the dielectric function determine the frequencies of the

longitudinal modes of oscillation. That is, the condition determines the
longitudinal frequency wL near K = 0.

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PLASMONS
• A plasma oscillation in a metal
is a collective longitudinal
excitation of the conduction
electron gas.
• A plasmon is a quantum of a
plasma oscillation; we may
excite a plasmon by passing an
electron through a thin metallic
or by reflecting an electron or a
photon from a film.
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• The charge of the
electron couples with the
electrostatic field
fluctuations of the plasma
oscillations. The reflected
or transmitted electron
will show an energy loss
equal to integral multiples
of the plasmon energy.

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ELECTROSTATIC SCREENING

The electric field of a positive

charge embedded in an
The static screening can be
electron gas falls off with
described by the wavevector
increasing r faster than 1/r,
dependence of the static
because the electron gas tends
dielectric function (0,K).
to gather around and thus to
screen the positive charge.

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SCREENED COULOMB
POTENTIAL
• One application of the screened interaction is to the resistivity
of certain alloys. The atoms of the series Cu, Zn, Ga, Ge, As
have valences 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. An atom of Zn, Ga, Ge, or As added
substitutionally to metallic Cu has an excess charge, referred
to Cu, of 1, 2, 3, or 4 if all the valence electrons join the
conduction band of the host metal. The foreign atom scatters
the conduction electrons, with an interaction given by the
screened coulomb potential. This scattering contributes to the
residual electrical resistivity, and calculations by Mott of the
resistivity increase are in fair agreement with experiment.
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 PSEUDOPOTENTIAL
COMPONENT U(0).
“FOR VERY SMALL K THE POTENTIAL APPROACHES
TIMES THE FERMI ENERGY.”

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PSEUDOPOTENTIAL COMPONENT U(0)

• “For very small k the potential approaches -2/3 times

the Fermi energy.”
• The result, which is known as the screened ion limit
for metals, can be derived from Eq

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• When converted to the potential energy of an electron of charge e in
a metal of valency z with n0 ions per unit volume, the potential
energy component at k = 0 becomes

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 • A crystal with one hydrogen molecule per
primitive cell is a different matter, because the
two electrons can fill a band. Under extreme
MOTT METAL- high pressure, as in the planet Jupiter, it is
possible that hydrogen occurs in a metallic form.
INSULATOR But let us imagine a lattice of hydrogen atoms at
TRANSITION absolute zero: will this be a metal or an
insulator? The answer depends on the lattice
constant, with small values of a giving a metal
and large values giving an insulator.

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The term metal-insulator transition has come to denote situations where
the electrical conductivity of a material changes from metal to insulator as
a function of some external parameter, which may be composition,
pressure, strain, or magnetic field.

The metallic phase may usually be pictured in terms of an independent-

electron model; the insulator phase may suggest important electron-
electron interactions. Sites randomly occupied introduce new and
interesting aspects to the problem, aspects that lie within percolation
theory.
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• When a semiconductor is
doped with increasing
concentrations of donor (or
acceptor) atoms, a
transition will occur to a
conducting metallic phase.

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SCREENING AND PHONONS IN METAL

An interesting application of our two limiting forms of the

dielectric function is to longitude

Provided the sound velocity is less than the Fermi velocity

of the electrons, we may use for the electrons the Thomas-
Fermi dielectric function.nal acoustic phonons in metals.
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POLARITONS

WHEN THE TWO WAVES ARE AT RESONANCE THE PHONON-PHOTON

COUPLING ENTIRELY CHANGES THE CHARACTER OF THE
PROPAGATION, AND A FORBIDDEN BAND IS ESTABLISHED FOR
REASONS THAT HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH THE PERIODICITY OF THE
LATTICE.
BY RESONANCE WE MEAN A CONDITION IN WHICH THE FREQUENCIES
AND WAVEVECTORS OF BOTH WAVES ARE APPROXIMATELY EQUAL.

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• The region of the crossover of
the two dashed curves in Fig is
the resonance region; the two
dashed curves are the
dispersion relations for photons
and transverse optical phonons
in the absence of any coupling
between them
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• In reality, however, there always is coupling implicit in Maxwell’s equations and
expressed by the dielectric function.

• The quantum of the coupled phonon-photon transverse wave field is called a

polariton.

• Longitudinal phonons do not couple to transverse photons in the bulk of a crystal

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LST RELATION

• where e(0) is the static dielectric constant and

e(∞) is the high-frequency limit of the dielectric
function, defined to include the core electron
contribution. This result is the Lyddane-Sachs-
Teller relation. The derivation assumed a cubic
crystal with two atoms per primitive cell. For
soft modes with wT → 0 we see that e(0) → ∞,
a characteristic of ferroelectricity.

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 • Fermi Liquid Because of the interaction of the
conduction electrons with each other through their
electrostatic interaction, the electrons suffer
collisions.

• Further, a moving electron causes an inertial reaction

in the surrounding electron gas, thereby increasing
ELECTRON- the effective mass of the electron.

ELECTRON • The effects of electronelectron interactions are usually

INTERACTION described within the framework of the Landau theory
of a Fermi liquid.

• The object of the theory is to give a unified account of

the effect of interactions. A Fermi gas is a system of
noninteracting fermions; the same system with
interactions is a Fermi liquid. 23
 Landau’s theory gives a good account of
the low-lying single particle excitations of
the system of interacting electrons. These A quasiparticle may be thought of as a
single particle excitations are called single particle accompanied by a
quasiparticles; they have a one-to-one distortion cloud in the electron gas.
correspondence with the single particle
excitations of the free-electron gas.

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• One effect of the coulomb interactions between electrons is to change
the effective mass of the electron; in the alkali metals the increase is
roughly of the order of 25 percent.

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 ELECTRON-ELECTRON COLLISIONS.
• It is an astonishing property of metals that conduction electrons,
although crowded together only 2 Å apart, travel long distances
between collisions with each other. The mean free paths for electron-
electron collisions are longer than 104 Å at room temperature and
longer than 10 cm at 1 K.

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• Two factors are responsible for
these long mean free paths,
without which the free-electron
model of metals would have
little value. The most powerful
factor is the exclusion principle
(Fig), and the second factor is
the screening of the coulomb
interaction between two
electrons.

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 • The most common effect of the electron-phonon
interaction is seen in the temperature dependence
of the electrical resistivity, which for pure copper is
1.55 microhm-cm at 0°C and 2.28 microhm-cm at
ELECTRON- 100°C.

PHONON • The electrons are scattered by the phonons, and

INTERACTION: the higher the temperature, the more phonons
there are and hence more scattering. Above the
POLARONS Debye temperature the number of thermal
phonons is roughly proportional to the absolute
temperature, and we find that the resistivity
increases approximately as the absolute
temperature in any reasonably pure metal in this
temperature region. 28
• A more subtle effect of the electron-phonon interaction is the apparent
increase in electron mass that occurs because the electron drags the
heavy ion cores along with it. In an insulator the combination of the
electron and its strain field is known as a polaron

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• The effect is large in ionic crystals because of the strong coulomb
interaction between ions and electrons.
• In covalent crystals the effect is weak because neutral atoms have only
a weak interaction with electrons.

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• The strength of the electron-lattice interaction is measured by the
dimensionless coupling constant given by:

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The electron associated with a large polaron moves in a band, but the mass is
slightly enhanced; these are the polarons we have discussed above.

The electron associated with a small polaron spends most of its time trapped
on a single ion. At high temperatures the electron moves from site to site by
thermally activated hopping; at low temperatures the electron tunnels slowly
through the crystal, as if in a band of large effective mass.

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Holes or electrons can become self-trapped by inducing an
asymmetric local deformation of the lattice. This is most likely to
occur when the band edge is degenerate and the crystal is polar
(such as an alkali halide or silver halide), with strong coupling of the
particle to the lattice.

The valence band edge is more often degenerate than the

conduction band edge, so that holes are more likely to be self-
trapped than are electrons.

Holes appear to be selftrapped in all the alkali and silver halides.

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 • Consider a one-dimensional metal with an
PEIERLS electron gas filling all conduction band orbitals
INSTABILITY out to the wavevector kF, at absolute zero of
OF LINEAR temperature. Peierls suggested that such a
linear metal is unstable with respect to a static
METALS lattice deformation of wavevector G = 2kF.

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• Such a deformation creates
an energy gap at the Fermi
surface, thereby lowering
the energy of electrons
below the energy gap, Fig.

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