Semiconductor electron-phonon equations: A rung above Boltzmann in the many-body ladder

Abstract

Starting from the ab initio many-body theory of electrons and phonons, we go through a series of well defined simplifications to derive a set of coupled equations of motion for the electronic occupations and polarizations, nuclear displacements as well as phononic occupations and coherences. These are the semiconductor electron-phonon equations (SEPE), sharing the same scaling with system size and propagation time as the Boltzmann equations. At the core of the SEPE is the mirrored Generalized Kadanoff-Baym Ansatz (GKBA) for the Green’s functions, an alternative to the standard GKBA which we show to lead to unstable equilibrium states. The SEPE treat coherent and incoherent degrees of freedom on equal footing, widen the scope of the semiconductor Bloch equations and Boltzmann equations, and reduce to them under additional simplifications. The new features of the SEPE pave the way for first-principles studies of phonon squeezed states and coherence effects in time-resolved absorption and diffraction experiments.