Electron--phonon interaction without overscreening: a strategy for first--principles modelling

Abstract: State-of-the-art approaches to calculate the electron-phonon and the phonon-electron self-energy are based on a mean-field approximation for the interacting electronic system. This approach introduces an overscreening error which results in an underestimation of the electron-phonon coupling strength. We introduce a theoretical and numerical approach for the calculation of the phonon-electron self-energy without the overscreening error. Starting from the out-of-equilibrium Kadanoff-Baym equations for the phonon propagator, we discuss and compare the overscreened (i.e., symmetrically screened) and overscreening--free (i.e., asymmetrically screened) cases. We point out that the difficulty in treating the latter stems from the static approximation to the dielectric function and from the need to obtain a self-energy that preserves the elementary scattering processes. We solve both problems in the equilibrium case by considering a manifestly symmetric form of the correct self-energy which can be easily calculated numerically and yields an overscreening--free coupling strength. Finally, we describe the numerical implementation of this treatment into the first--principles Yambo code for the calculations of phonon linewidths.