Extending the Feynman variational principle and analytical methods to lattice polarons

Abstract

We develop and compare several analytical approximations for the ground state and zero-temperature polaron dispersion in finite-width, nonparabolic conduction bands. The main focus of the work is an extension of the Feynman variational method to a tight-binding lattice, where the effective-mass approximation is no longer applicable. The resulting variational formulation is not restricted to a specific phonon dispersion or electron-phonon interaction and provides a uniform description across weak-, intermediate-, and strong-coupling regimes. In addition, we revisit and generalize other analytical approaches traditionally formulated for continuum polarons, including canonical transformations and self-consistent Wigner-Brillouin-type approximations. For lattice polarons, these methods exhibit qualitative features absent in the continuum case, such as a nontrivial connection between weak- and strong-coupling limits. We show that an improved Wigner-Brillouin scheme yields a momentum-dependent polaron self-energy free of resonances and in good agreement with numerically exact results. All methods are applied to the Holstein model on a tight-binding lattice and are benchmarked against numerically exact calculations, including diagrammatic Monte Carlo (both our calculations and preceding works) and exact diagonalization results. Furthermore, the analytical approaches are extended to polarons with Rashba-type spin-orbit coupling, providing a stringent test of their applicability in systems with nontrivial band structure. Our results demonstrate that the modified Feynman variational method yields ground-state energies and dispersions with accuracy comparable to, and in many cases exceeding, that of other established analytical approaches. The developed framework offers a versatile and reliable analytical description of lattice polarons beyond the continuum approximation.