Bipolaron dynamics in the one-dimensional SSH model

Abstract

Characterizing bipolaron binding, and understanding how it depends on electron-phonon interaction, is crucial to unraveling the nature of emergent many-body states in strongly interacting electron-phonon systems. So far, most studies of bipolarons have been limited to the Holstein model, in which the coupling constant is momentum-independent. The paradigmatic example of momentum-dependent electron-phonon interaction comes from the system in which phonon distortions modify electron hopping, the SSH model. Already individual polarons in the SSH model are richer than the Holstein model counterparts, and feature a phase transition into the finite momentum ground state with increasing electron-phonon interaction. In this paper, we use a variational approach to study bipolarons in the one-dimensional SSH model and discuss their ground state, dispersion, and excitation spectra. We explore the full parameter range of the system, including the adiabatic regime of slow phonons, which was inaccessible to previous theoretical studies. In agreement with earlier studies, we find that in the anti-adiabatic strongly interacting regime, bipolarons have low effective mass. By contrast, in the adiabatic case, we find that increasing electron-phonon interactions results in an exponential increase of the bipolaron mass. We establish the existence of multiple branches of bound excited states of SSH bipolaron and discuss the signatures of these bound states in dynamics. We show that in the anti-adiabatic regime, response functions obey a parity selection rule, that imposes symmetry constraints on the excitation spectra and provides a clear signature of SSH bipolarons.