Derivation of an effective evolution equation for a strongly coupled polaron (Q514641)

Polarons, i.e., electrons interacting with phonon excitations in ionic lattices, are usually described by two types of models: the Fröhlich Hamiltonian, in which the phonon excitations are treated as a quantum bosonic field, and the Landau-Pekar model (originally, it was proposed in a phenomenological form), in which the phonon field is a classical one. This paper aims to revisit the relation between these two theories, i.e., essentially, the derivation of the Landau-Pekar classical equations from the Fröhlich Hamiltonian. This derivation is performed in the limit of a large electron-phonon coupling constant, \(\alpha\), by introducing the classical phonon fields as certain expectation values of operators of quantum bosonic fields. The rigorous analysis is carried out for the evolution of the fields, assuming certain regularity conditions for the initial input, and the proof establishes the result for finite but large evolution times \(\sim \alpha\).