Bosonization of coupled electron-phonon systems

Abstract

We calculate the single-particle Green's function of electrons that are coupled to acoustic phonons by means of higher dimensional bosonization. This non-perturbative method is {\it{not}} based on the assumption that the electronic system is a Fermi liquid. For isotropic three-dimensional phonons we find that the long-range part of the Coulomb interaction cannot destabilize the Fermi liquid state, although for strong electron-phonon coupling the quasi-particle residue is small. We also show that Luttinger liquid behavior in three dimensions can be due to quasi-one-dimensional anisotropy in the electronic band structure {\it{or in the phonon frequencies}}.