Peierls instability with electron-electron interaction: the commensurate case

Abstract

We consider a quantum many-body model describing a system of electrons interacting with themselves and hopping from one ion to another of a one dimensional lattice. We show that the ground state energy of such system, as a functional of the ionic configurations, has local minima in correspondence of configurations described by smooth ${π\over p_F}$ periodic functions, if the interaction is repulsive and large enough and $p_F$ is the Fermi momentum of the electrons. This means physically that a $d=1$ metal develop a periodic distortion of its reticular structure (Peierls instability). The minima are found solving the Eulero-Lagrange equations of the energy by a contraction method.