Free Energy of the Fröhlich Polaron in Two and Three Dimensions

Abstract

We present a novel path integral Monte Carlo scheme to solve the Fröhlich polaron model. At intermediate and strong electron-phonon couplings, the polaron self-trapping is properly taken into account at the level of an effective action obtained by a preaveraging procedure with a retarded trial action. We compute the free energy at several couplings and temperatures in three and two dimensions. Our results show that the accuracy of the Feynman variational upper bound for the free energy is always within a few percent. The method can be generalized to the $N$-polarons case.