Migdal's theorem and electron-phonon vertex corrections in Dirac materials

Migdal's theorem plays a central role in the physics of electron-phonon interactions in metals and semiconductors, and has been extensively studied theoretically for parabolic band electronic systems in three-, two-, and one-dimensional systems over the last fifty years. In the current work, we theoretically study the relevance of Migdal's theorem in graphene and Weyl semimetals which are examples of 2D and 3D Dirac materials, respectively, with linear and chiral band dispersion. Our work also applies to 2D and 3D topological insulator systems. In Fermi liquids, the renormalization of the electron-phonon vertex scales as the ratio of sound ($v_s$) to Fermi ($v_F$) velocity, which is typically a small quantity. In two- and three-dimensional quasirelativistic systems, such as undoped graphene and Weyl semimetals, the one loop electron-phonon vertex renormalization, which also scales as $\eta =v_s/v_F$ as $\eta \to 0$, is, however, enhanced by an ultraviolet logarithmic divergent correction, arising from the linear, chiral Dirac band dispersion. Such enhancement of the electron-phonon vertex can be significantly softened due to the logarithmic increment of the Fermi velocity, arising from the long range Coulomb interaction, and therefore, the electron-phonon vertex correction does not have a logarithmic divergence at low energy. Otherwise, the Coulomb interaction does not lead to any additional renormalization of the electron-phonon vertex. Therefore, electron-phonon vertex corrections in two- and three-dimensional Dirac fermionic systems scale as $v_s/v_F^0$, where $v_F^0$ is the bare Fermi velocity, and small when $v_s\ll v_F^0$. These results, although explicitly derived for the intrinsic undoped systems, should hold even when the chemical potential is tuned away from the Dirac points.

Figure 1

One loop correction of the electron-phonon vertex. The wavy (solid) lines represent phonons (fermions).

Figure 2

$G\left(\eta \right)$(left) and $H\left(\eta \right)$(right) as functions of $\eta =v_s/v_F$.

Figure 3

Solutions of the renormalized Fermi velocity $v_F$ (red) and fine structure constant α (blue), as a function of momentum cutoff $log(\Lambda /{\Lambda }_e)$, for a particular choice of initial values $v_F^0=0.3$ and ${\alpha }_{FS}^0=1$.