Abstract
We consider the Fröhlich Hamiltonian in a mean-field limit where many bosonic particles weakly couple to the quantized phonon field. For large particle numbers and a suitably small coupling, we show that the dynamics of the system is approximately described by the Landau–Pekar equations. These describe a Bose–Einstein condensate interacting with a classical polarization field, whose dynamics is effected by the condensate, i.e., the back-reaction of the phonons that are created by the particles during the time evolution is of leading order.
Introduction
We consider the dynamics of N bosonic particles interacting with a quantized phonon field described by the Fröhlich model in a mean field regime. The underlying Hilbert space is
| 1.1 |
where the N particles are described by states in , the subspace of all complex-valued square integrable N-particle wave functions that are symmetric under the exchange of any pair of the coordinates , and where the phonon field is represented by elements in the bosonic Fock space The time evolution of the system is governed by the Schrödinger equation
| 1.2 |
with the Fröhlich Hamiltonian
| 1.3 |
Here, is the Laplacian acting on the jth particle with coordinate , and denote the usual bosonic annihilation and creation operators satisfying the canonical commutation relations
| 1.4 |
and is the number operator defined by . The coupling parameter is introduced to scale the strength of the interaction between the particles and the phonon field. If the number of phonons is of order N and is fixed, the factor and the fact that the creation and annihilation operators scale like (they are bounded by , see (3.3)) ensure that the kinetic and potential energy are of the same order for large N.
We note that the expression (1.3) is somewhat formal, since the form factor in the interaction term is not square integrable. By a well-known argument going back to Lieb and Yamazaki [26] (cf. Lemma A.1), the right side of (1.3) defines a closed bounded from below quadratic form with domain given by the form domain of . The self-adjoint operator that corresponds to this form is called Fröhlich Hamiltonian and denoted by . We refer to [16] for a detailed description of its domain (see also Lemma 3.1).
If the number N of particles is large, we show for a particular class of initial states that the solution of the many-body Schrödinger equation (1.2) can be approximated by Pekar product states, i.e., states of the form
| 1.5 |
where is the vacuum state in , W denotes the Weyl operator and solve the time-dependent Landau–Pekar equations
| 1.6 |
where
| 1.7 |
The Weyl operator is defined for any by
| 1.8 |
In the Pekar product state (1.5), the phonons are in the coherent state with average number of excitations of order N, and the bosonic particles form a pure Bose–Einstein condensate with condensate wave function . According to the Landau–Pekar equations, the one-particle condensate wave function evolves in the potential created by the phonons, while the phonon field couples to the particles via the source term involving the density .
Our main result can be summarized as follows: given an initial wave function that is close to a Pekar product state (close in an appropriate sense that will be specified in the next section), then the time evolved state remains close to the time evolved Pekar state (1.5) when .
The Landau–Pekar equations were originally introduced in [21] to approximate the time evolution of a single polaron in the strong coupling limit. In our notation, the strong coupling regime corresponds to the Hamiltonian with . Partial results concerning a rigorous derivation of the Landau–Pekar equations in the strong coupling limit were obtained in [8, 10, 15, 25] (for a detailed comparison between the different results we refer to [25, Chapter 2]). In these works, the Landau–Pekar equations are justified for short times, namely at most for times of order with arbitrary small.1 A derivation for times of order one, the time scale in the strong coupling limit at which the back-reaction of the phonons that are created during the time evolution is of leading order, remains an open problem. The emergence of classical radiation in the strong coupling limit is expected to rely on the adiabatic decoupling between the relatively fast moving (with respect to ) electron and the radiation field. For results on adiabatic theorems of the Landau–Pekar equations in one and three dimensions we refer to [9, 25].
In the many-particle mean-field limit considered in this work, the creation of coherent radiation happens for a different reason than in the strong coupling regime, namely because there are many particles in the same quantum state that simultaneously create the phonons. In this regard, the present work is related to [1, 7, 22–24], where many-body mean-field limits of the renormalized Nelson model, the Nelson model with ultraviolet cutoff and the (bosonic) Pauli–Fierz model are considered. In particular, we mention [1] where the Schrödinger–Klein–Gordon equations were derived by the Wigner measure approach as a limit of the renormalized Nelson model.
In [4, 5, 12], effective equations for the Nelson, Pauli–Fierz and Fröhlich model were derived in a partially classical limit. There, the number of particles is kept fixed while the number of excitations of the quantum field tends to infinity and the coupling constant approaches zero in a suitable sense. The effect of the excitations that are created during time evolution is negligible in this limit and the quantum field can thus be approximated by a classical field that evolves freely or remains constant in time.
To the best of our knowledge, the present work provides the first derivation of the Landau–Pekar equations in a limit in which the back-reaction of the phonons that are created during time evolution is of leading order. Moreover, our results include explicit error estimates.
In order to derive our results, we follow [24], which combines the methods from [29, 31]. The new technical challenge in comparison with [24] is to show that the high momentum phonons do not obstruct the expected mean-field behavior. This requires several nontrivial modifications. First, it is crucial to introduce a measure for the excitations around the condensate resp. around the coherent state that involves the canonical transformation due to Gross and Nelson (see (2.12)). In particular, we use the representation of the Fröhlich Hamiltonian in [16]. The most difficult part is to control the interaction between the ultraviolet modes of the phonon field and the fraction of particles not in the condensate. To this end, we restrict our consideration to a subclass of the initial states which have small fluctuations in the energy per particle observable and combine estimates similar to [23, Sect. VIII.1] with an operator bound that is motivated by [10, Lemma 10]. The idea of using this restriction in order to treat the singular interaction between quantum fields and particles in the mean field regime was already used in [23].
The article is organized as follows: in the next section, we state our main results. In Theorem 2.1, we consider initial states in the domain of the Fröhlich Hamiltonian, while Theorem 2.2 is about initial states in the domain of the noninteracting model (including, in particular, product states). In Section 3, we introduce useful notation and discuss the representation of the Fröhlich Hamiltonian via the Gross transformation. The key steps of the proof of our main result are summarized in Section 4 in terms of several lemmas. The proofs of these are given in Sections 5–7.
Main Results
For notational convenience, we set the coupling constant from now on and denote . All statements and proofs that follow are, however, equally true for any independent of N.
In order to state our main results we define for the one-particle reduced density matrix
| 2.1 |
on the Hilbert space . Here, denotes the partial trace over the coordinates and the trace over Fock space. The particles of a many-body state are said to exhibit complete Bose–Einstein condensation if there exists with such that
| 2.2 |
as . In this case is called the condensate wave function. Moreover, we define (for and )
| 2.3 |
| 2.4 |
| 2.5 |
For , let denote the Sobolev space of order m and a weighted -space with norm . We will use the following result which was proven in [8]:
Proposition 2.1
(Lemma C.2 in [8]) The Landau–Pekar equations (1.6) are globally well-posed in . For all we have
| 2.6 |
where C is a constant depending only on the initial data.
We are now ready to state our main theorem.
Theorem 2.1
Let s.t. , and s.t. and . Let be the unique solution of (1.6) with initial datum and . Then, there exists a constant (depending only on , and ) such that
| 2.7 |
| 2.8 |
The proof is given in Section 4.
Remark 2.1
If one considers initial many-body states in which the particles are in a Bose–Einstein condensate, the phonons are in a coherent states and the energy has small fluctuations around its mean value, i.e.
| 2.9 |
it follows from Theorem 2.1 that
| 2.10 |
Our result consequently shows the stability of the condensate and the coherent state during the time evolution.
Remark 2.2
The condition as restricts the initial data to many-body states whose energy per particle has small fluctuations around its mean value. In our proof, this is important to obtain sufficient control on the singular ultraviolet behavior of the interaction term in . We give a detailed explanation of this point in Section 5. In the presence of an ultraviolet cutoff in the Fröhlich Hamiltonian, the estimates (2.7) and (2.8) hold without the appearance of on the right hand side, but with a cutoff dependent constant C. In this simpler case, the statement could be proven in close analogy to [7, 24] where the Nelson model was considered with ultraviolet cutoff.
Next, we give examples of initial states that satisfy (2.9). The quantities and are identically zero for Pekar product states with . However, such Pekar states are in the domain of the free Hamiltonian
| 2.11 |
and thus, as shown in [16], can not be elements of . As a consequence, would be infinite in this case. To specify states that satisfy (2.9), we introduce the Gross transform
| 2.12 |
where
| 2.13 |
for . The Gross transform, which goes back to Gross and Nelson [17, 28], relates the domains of and to each other.2 In Lemma 3.1 we show that there is a such that for all and all , the domains satisfy
| 2.14 |
If we choose K as an N-dependent sufficiently rapidly growing sequence , then the Gross transform has negligible effect on the condensate and the coherent state structure. This is summarized in the next proposition.
Proposition 2.2
Assume for some and consider the state with and . Then there exists a such that and
| 2.15 |
with , and defined as in Theorem 2.1.
We prove this proposition in Section 7.2. As an immediate consequence of Proposition 2.2 (with ) and Theorem 2.1 one finds
| 2.16 |
and
| 2.17 |
for initial states of the form .
Since the quantities and appearing on the right side of (2.7) and (2.8) are expectation values of unbounded operators, it is not possible to generalize Theorem 2.1 to initial states via a simple density argument. Using the Gross transform, however, it is possible to obtain a similar result for initial states in a subset of . This follows from Theorem 2.1 in combination with (2.14) and the fact that converges strongly to the identity operator for . The precise statement is as follows:
Theorem 2.2
Let for some . Let with , and such that and
| 2.18 |
Let be the unique solution of (1.6) with initial datum and . Then, there exists a constant (depending only on c, , and ) such that
| 2.19 |
| 2.20 |
In particular, for the Pekar initial state we have the bounds
| 2.21 |
| 2.22 |
The proof is given in Section 7.3.
Remark 2.3
The restriction was chosen in order to minimize the error terms in (2.19) and (2.20).
Remark 2.4
Note that in (2.20) we only control the time evolution of , while in (2.8) we estimate the operator .
Preliminaries
Notation and Basic Estimates
We introduce the usual bosonic creation and annihilation operators
| 3.1 |
as well as the field operators
| 3.2 |
They satisfy the bounds
| 3.3 |
and
| 3.4 |
for any . For , we define the classical fields
| 3.5 |
Moreover, it is useful to define the functions
| 3.6 |
and as in (2.13). The bounds
| 3.7 |
are straightforward to verify and will be frequently used in the rest of the article. We also have
| 3.8 |
for .
Notation: The functions and will frequently be denoted by and , respectively. Depending on the context and will refer to the norm and scalar product either of or . If the spaces and (with ) appear as subscripts we will abbreviate them by and .
Weyl Operators and Gross Transform
The Weyl operator W(f) defined in (1.8) is unitary, i.e., , and satisfies the relations
| 3.9 |
as well as the shift property
| 3.10 |
This immediately implies that the Gross transform, as defined in (2.12), is unitary. Moreover, it has the properties
| 3.11 |
(which holds since for all ) and
| 3.12 |
The Fröhlich Hamiltonian
In [16], Griesemer and Wünsch give an explicit representation of with the aid of the Gross transform when . Below, we state the analogous representation for , which will be useful for the proof of our main theorem. Considering does not impose additional difficulties compared to [16].
Definition 3.1
With and defined in (2.13) and (3.6), respectively, we set
| 3.13 |
| 3.14 |
| 3.15 |
and define the Gross transformed Fröhlich Hamiltonian as
| 3.16 |
Note that (3.7) immediately implies the bound
| 3.17 |
for suitable . The next result, which is the generalization of [16, Theorem 3.7] to , justifies denoting as Gross transformed Fröhlich Hamiltonian.
Lemma 3.1
The operator is self-adjoint on for all . Moreover, there exists a such that for all and , the self-adjoint operator associated to the quadratic form defined by (1.3) has the representation
| 3.18 |
We shall comment on the proof of this lemma in “Appendix A”.
For use below, we also note that there is , such that for all and ,
| 3.19 |
| 3.20 |
hold as inequalities on the Hilbert space without symmetry constraints on the particles. This will be useful later in order to estimate expectation values with respect to wave functions that are not permutation symmetric in all particle coordinates, as e.g. in (5.8). The derivation of (3.19) and (3.20) is postponed to “Appendix A”.
Proof of the Main Theorem
We first state three preliminary lemmas from which the proof of Theorem 2.1 then follows easily. The proofs of the lemmas are postponed to later sections.
If we take the limit , the Gross transform has only negligible effect on the one-particle reduced density and the coherent structure of the phonon field. This is quantified in the following lemma, whose proof is given in Sec. 7.1:
Lemma 4.1
Assume such that Lemma 3.1 holds. Let , with , and the Gross transform defined as in (2.12). Then,
| 4.1 |
and
| 4.2 |
for some .
Next, we define a functional to compare with the Pekar state . To this end, we introduce for the projections and , given by
| 4.3 |
for , and . (More compactly, in bracket notation, ).
Definition 4.1
Let and with and , . We define , and by
| 4.4 |
| 4.5 |
| 4.6 |
Moreover, we define by
| 4.7 |
For solutions and of the Schrödinger equation (1.2) and the Landau–Pekar equations (1.6), respectively, we use the shorthand notations
Remark 4.1
Note that
| 4.8 |
Remark 4.2
being small compared to one ensures that
the N-particle component of is approximately given by the product —more precisely, measures the relative number of particles not in ,
the phonon component of is close to the coherent state —more, precisely, measures the relative number of excitations with respect to the coherent state ,
the variance of with respect to is small compared to one—this will be used to control the singular ultraviolet behavior of the phonon field (for a detailed explanation of this point, see the beginning of Section 5). Also note that is a conserved quantity, and thus requiring to be small only poses a restriction on the initial state. Since , Proposition 2.2 shows that is small for initial states of the form with large enough.
The functional can consequently be used to monitor whether the condensate of the particles and the coherent state of the phonons is stable during the time evolution. Its definition is motivated by a previous work on the derivation of the Maxwell–Schrödinger equations [23]. In addition it is necessary to include the Gross transform in the definition of and . This induces correlations between the electron and the phonons and effectively regularizes the interaction. In this sense, the Gross transform has a similar role as the Bogoliubov transformation in the derivation of the time-dependent Gross-Pitaevskii equation (see for instance [2, 3, 20, 30]).
The trace norm of the difference and the quantity are related by
| 4.9 |
which is the content of the following lemma when :
Lemma 4.2
Let with and with . Then,
| 4.10 |
Proof
The lemma is a consequence of the identity
| 4.11 |
where the supremum is taken over all bounded operators and
| 4.12 |
acts non-trivially only on the variable . (Note that (4.11) holds because the space of bounded operators is the dual of the space of trace-class operators). The first bound then follows from
| 4.13 |
while for the second bound, one inserts on the left and right of and uses
| 4.14 |
together with the Cauchy–Schwarz inequality for the remaining terms.3
The main ingredient of the proof of Theorem 2.1 is the following estimate for :
Lemma 4.3
Assume such that Lemma 3.1 holds. Let with such that and . Let further be a solution of (1.6) with such that . Then, there exists a constant only depending on , , and , such that
| 4.15 |
The proof is given in Section 6. Putting the above statements together, we obtain the proof of Theorem 2.1.
Proof of Theorem 2.1
We first apply Grönwall’s argument to (4.15) in order to obtain
| 4.16 |
Next, set with as in Lemma 3.1, and compute
| 4.17 |
where we used inequality (4.1) in the first step, Lemma (4.2) in the second and (4.16) in the last one. The estimate (2.7) then follows from and
| 4.18 |
which in turn holds because of (4.9) and Lemma 4.1.
Using (4.2), we can similarly estimate
| 4.19 |
This completes the proof of the theorem.
The proofs of Proposition 2.2 and Theorem 2.2 are postponed to Sections 7.2 and 7.3, respectively.
Bound on
In this section, we state and prove a bound that is a crucial ingredient in the proof of Lemma 4.3.
Lemma 5.1
Assume such that Lemma 3.1 holds. Let and with , and set . Then
| 5.1 |
where for some .
Before we give its proof, we explain the importance of the above estimate. The main technical difficulty for controlling the time-derivative of arises from the singular ultraviolet behavior of the phonon field. In particular, if we want to estimate , we have to bound the following term (cf. Section 6.2)
| 5.2 |
by an N-independent constant times the functional . A naive estimate using the Cauchy–Schwarz inequality would give the bound
| 5.3 |
which is not sufficient for . The reason for the bad behavior for large K clearly comes from the careless estimate of the form factor .
The most obvious strategy for a better estimate is to apply the well-known commutator method of Lieb and Yamazaki [26], which utilizes the particle momentum in order to obtain a better ultraviolet behavior of the phonon field. More precisely, one writes the exponential in terms of a commutator with the gradient ,
| 5.4 |
which suggests a better decay for large provided that one has some control of the regularity of the particle with coordinate . Using this identity together with , we find by a straightforward computation that (6.21d) can be written as
| 5.5 |
With the aid of the Cauchy–Schwarz inequality and the canonical commutation relations this implies the bound
| 5.6 |
Contrary to (5.3), there is no more divergence for large K. However, the above inequality contains the new term . Thus if we want to apply Grönwall’s inequality we would have to show that this term is small compared to one or bounded by a constant times .4 It is not clear how to derive such a bound, however, and hence, we are forced to estimate in a different way.
A possible solution to this problem is to use a combination of the estimates from [23, Chapter VIII.1] with an operator bound that is motivated by [10, Lemma 10] (see Section 6 for the detailed argument). In short, we use the symmetry of the wave function and an estimate that is similar in spirit to the commutator method of Lieb and Yamazaki to obtain
| 5.7 |
As shown in Lemma 5.1, the new quantity can be bounded by and errors proportional to and .
Proof of Lemma 5.1
Using the symmetry of and , we can bound
| 5.8 |
With and (3.20), we thus have
| 5.9 |
By using and recalling Definition (3.1), we get
| 5.10a |
| 5.10b |
| 5.10c |
| 5.10d |
| 5.10e |
In what follows, we shall bound the various terms on the right hand side.
Line (5.10a). In the second summand in this line, we add and subtract , to obtain
| 5.11 |
With the aid of the Cauchy–Schwarz inequality and (3.18), we find
| 5.12 |
Line (5.10b). One readily obtains
| 5.13 |
Line (5.10c). Using (3.8), we find
| 5.14 |
and hence, using (3.20), (3.18) and , we have
| 5.15 |
Line (5.10d). We recall the definition of in (3.13) and estimate the term with by
| 5.16 |
Using and as quadratic forms on , together with (3.20), we find
| 5.17 |
With this at hand, we can proceed for the term with similarly as in (5.16), with the result that
| 5.18 |
Next, we estimate the term in line (5.10d) with ,
| 5.19 |
By summing up the terms, we obtain the bound
| 5.20 |
| 5.21 |
This completes the proof of the lemma.
Proof of Lemma 4.3 (Time Derivative of )
We first observe that
| 6.1 |
from which it follows readily that . The time-derivatives of and are estimated in the next two sections. Throughout both sections, we use the abbreviation .
Time Derivative of
For , we have
| 6.2 |
Using this together with (6.1), we compute
| 6.3 |
where we inserted and used that the term with on both sides is real. Recall Definition 3.1. Using , and the symmetry of , we can rewrite (6.3) as
| 6.4a |
| 6.4b |
| 6.4c |
| 6.4d |
The various terms will be bounded as follows:
Line (6.4a). We bound
| 6.5 |
For the second summand, we use
| 6.6 |
which follows directly from the canonical commutation relations. By the shift property (3.10), the last summand in (6.5) can be written as
| 6.7 |
In order to estimate this expression, we use [10, Lemma 10] which implies the bound
| 6.8 |
with
| 6.9 |
The latter is obtained via a rearrangement inequality. In combination, we thus have
| 6.10 |
Line (6.4b). This term can be estimated as
| 6.11 |
Line (6.4c). It follows from (5.20) that
| 6.12 |
Line (6.4d). In analogy to (5.21) one finds
| 6.13 |
In combination, we have thus shown that
| 6.14 |
Time Derivative of
From (6.1) we get
| 6.15a |
| 6.15b |
which is a slightly formal computation, since the use of the product rule of differentiation is not completely obvious here. We clarify the difficulty and justify the above identity in detail in “Appendix B”. Next, we write the first line in terms of the commutator as
| 6.16 |
Let us remark that the right hand side is well defined since the commutator of and
| 6.17 |
defines a bounded operator from to . This fact is a direct consequence of the B.L.T. theorem because is a bounded operator from to and the estimate
| 6.18 |
holds for all and some constant . The latter is straightforward to verify with the aid of
| 6.19 |
and the basic estimates from Section 3.
Hence, we can proceed by using (6.16) and (6.19) together with the Landau–Pekar equations (1.6) and the symmetry of the many-body wave function in order to obtain
| 6.20 |
Finally, inserting the identity leads to
| 6.21a |
| 6.21b |
| 6.21c |
| 6.21d |
| 6.21e |
In what follows, we estimate each term on the r.h.s. separately.
Line (6.21a). The first term is the most important because it is the one where the particle density cancels the source term of the Landau–Pekar equations. We first note that
| 6.22 |
We then use and integrate by parts to obtain the bound
| 6.23 |
Hence,
| 6.24 |
Line (6.21b). We again use (6.23) and estimate
| 6.25 |
Line (6.21c). Writing (6.21c) as
| 6.26 |
shows that this is exactly the same expression as the second line in (6.5). We consequently have
| 6.27 |
Line (6.21d). To find a suitable bound for (6.21d) is the most difficult step in the proof. We start by estimating
| 6.28 |
The last term is bounded by
| 6.29 |
With one has
| 6.30 |
Thus, using the symmetry of the wave function and , we obtain the bound
| 6.31 |
In combination with
| 6.32 |
(compare with (6.9)) and Lemma 5.1 this gives
| 6.33 |
Line (6.21e). We have
| 6.34 |
By using (3.7), the symmetry of the wave function and (3.20), we get
| 6.35 |
In total, we thus arrive at
| 6.36 |
Conclusion: We combine , (6.14) and (6.36) with Proposition (2.1) and in order to obtain (4.15).
Remaining Proofs
Proof of Lemma 4.1
To show the inequality (4.1), we use with , which follows directly from (3.11) and the definition of the reduced density matrix. Hence,
| 7.1 |
Using , we obtain (4.1) from the bound
| 7.2 |
together with , (3.20) and (3.18). Inequality (7.2) follows from the spectral calculus for self-adjoint operators, using with in combination with .
Using the properties of the Weyl operator (in particular (3.9) together with (3.11)) and
| 7.3 |
we have
| 7.4 |
An application of (3.7) and (3.20) then leads to
| 7.5 |
Proof of Proposition 2.2
Throughout this section, we set . The bound on the energy follows from
| 7.6 |
in combination with (3.17), (A.2) and
| 7.7 |
In (7.7), we used the shift property of the Weyl operators (3.10).
For the bound on , we note that
| 7.8 |
since and . Applying Lemma (4.1), we obtain the stated estimate. The bound on follows readily from (3.12),
| 7.9 |
We are thus left with the bound for , which we write with the aid of (3.18) as
| 7.10 |
Recalling Definition 3.1 and using the triangle inequality, we get
| 7.11 |
After a lengthy but straightforward computation, using the shift property (3.10) and the fact that commutes with , we find that
| 7.12 |
We shall show that the right hand side is bounded from above by a constant times , with the constant depending only on and . For the first four summands (i.e., the terms in the first line), this is obvious (recall (3.7)). In the fifth summand, we can use (6.23) to conclude that
independently of K. For each of the remaining terms on the right side of (7.12), we use
| 7.13 |
which is bounded by . Hence, we find
| 7.14 |
Next, we use
| 7.15 |
and recalling (3.13) we estimate (with )
| 7.16 |
Similarly, we also have
| 7.17 |
In order to estimate the term containing , consider
| 7.18 |
and thus
| 7.19 |
In the last line, we use (3.7) to obtain
| 7.20 |
Finally, using (3.17), we estimate
| 7.21 |
which completes the proof of the proposition.
Proof of Theorem 2.2
Given Theorem 2.1, (2.19) follows from (4.1) together with the bound
| 7.22 |
The latter follows from , (3.20) and the functional calculus for self-adjoint operators, using with and the bound . In more detail, let as in Theorem 2.2 and denote . Then, using (7.22),
| 7.23 |
and the triangle inequality,
| 7.24 |
Since and by assumption, we infer with Theorem 2.1 that
| 7.25 |
Using Lemma 4.1, we have
| 7.26 |
which proves the first bound in Theorem 2.2 if we set .
In order to prove (2.20), we estimate
| 7.27a |
| 7.27b |
with defined as above. In the first line, we use the Cauchy–Schwarz inequality and apply Theorem 2.1 to , i.e.,
| 7.28 |
where we made use of (7.26) in the second step. In (7.27b), we estimate
| 7.29 |
together with
| 7.30 |
which for proves (2.20). In order to show (7.30), we use the commutation relations (3.10) and , in order to find
| 7.31 |
Using (3.19) in combination with (3.20) leads to
| 7.32 |
It remains to show (2.21) and (2.22): For the Pekar state , we have
| 7.33 |
where the last bound was proven in Proposition 2.2. Thus, if we choose , we obtain (2.21) and (2.22).
Acknowledgements
Financial support by the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (Grant Agreement No 694227; N.L and R.S.), the SNSF Eccellenza Project PCEFP2 181153 (N.L) and the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) through the Research Training Group 1838: Spectral Theory and Dynamics of Quantum Systems (D.M.) is gratefully acknowledged. N.L. gratefully acknowledges support from the NCCR SwissMAP and would like to thank Simone Rademacher and Benjamin Schlein for interesting discussions about the time-evolution of the polaron at strong coupling. D.M. thanks Marcel Griesemer and Andreas Wünsch for extensive discussions about the Fröhlich polaron.
Auxiliary Bounds
In this appendix, we collect bounds on the interaction terms of the Hamiltonians and and derive the frequently used inequalities (3.19) and (3.20). After that we comment on the proof of Lemma 3.1.
Lemma A.1
For every , , and , we have
| A.1 |
on . Moreover, with defined in Definition 3.1,
| A.2 |
Proof
To prove (A.1), we use again the commutator method by Lieb and Yamazaki [26]. Using (3.4) and (3.7), we have
| A.3 |
which proves (A.1) for . In the case , we write with . For the first summand, we use (A.3) with K replaced by and replaced by , while for the remainder, write
| A.4 |
with . The absolute value of the last expression is bounded from above by
| A.5 |
Using shows (A.1).
To show (A.2), we use and
| A.6 |
The previous lemma readily implies the validity of the bounds (3.19) and (3.20). With
| A.7 |
we can use (A.1) with in order to infer (3.19). Using in addition (3.17) and (A.2), one similarly obtains (3.20).
Comment on the proof of Lemma 3.1.
As already explained, Lemma 3.1 was stated and proved in [16] for the case . Since the statement can be proven by almost literal adaption of the argument from [16] (with obvious minor modifications), we omit all details except for the proof of the following lemma. The bound given in the lemma is one of the main ingredients in the proof, and in particular its N-dependence is crucial since it guarantees that we can choose in Lemma 3.1 independently of N.
Lemma A.2
For any there are and such that for all , and any ,
| A.8 |
Proof
We estimate each term in
| A.9 |
separately. Using (3.4), and , we have
| A.10 |
for any . The norm of can be bounded using (3.17). From (3.13) we see that the remaining terms to estimate are
| A.11 |
where we have used (3.4) and (3.7). Similarly, we have
| A.12 |
and
| A.13 |
In order to estimate the second summand, we use
| A.14 |
where
| A.15 |
The bound (A.14) is analogous to (6.8) and can be proven in the same way as [10, Lemma 10] (see also [15, Lemma B.5]). If one estimates the integral in (A.15) using the Cauchy–Schwarz inequality one sees that for . We thus have
| A.16 |
and hence,
| A.17 |
Choosing K large enough and sufficiently small completes the proof of the lemma.
Time Derivative of
Because of the unboundedness of the annihilation operator, it is not directly obvious that one can use the product rule of differentiation to obtain (6.15a) and (6.15b). Its rigorous justification relies on the estimate (for )
| B.1 |
which follows from Lemma A.2. Since , this together with the strong continuity of implies
| B.2 |
Note that
| B.3a |
| B.3b |
and that the first line is given by
| B.4 |
In the second line we use that
| B.5 |
as because of (B.2) and obtain
| B.6 |
with Stone’s theorem. Next, we consider
| B.7a |
| B.7b |
| B.7c |
| B.7d |
Using the Cauchy–Schwarz inequality we estimate the first two terms by
| B.8 |
Stone’s theorem and (B.5) then lead to
| B.9 |
Footnotes
It should be noted that results about the polaron in the strong coupling limit are usually formulated in strong coupling units and that times of order in the stated references correspond to times of order one in the units of the present paper.
The Gross transform adds correlations between the bosons and phonon modes with momentum . This leads to a better ultraviolet behavior of the radiation field.
From now on we omit the product with the identity and write and instead of and .
We note that the quantity can be related to the Sobolev trace norm difference between the one-particle reduced density matrix and the condensate wave function (see [27, Proof of Theorem 2.8] and [24, Lemma 7.1]).
Publisher's Note
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Contributor Information
Nikolai Leopold, Email: nikolai.leopold@unibas.ch.
David Mitrouskas, Email: dmitrous@ist.ac.at.
Robert Seiringer, Email: robert.seiringer@ist.ac.at.
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