Semiclassical analysis of the Nonequilibrium Local Polaron

Abstract

A resonant level strongly coupled to a local phonon under nonequilibrium conditions is investigated. The nonequilibrium Hartree-Fock approximation is shown to correspond to approximating the steady state density matrix by delta functions at field values to which the local dynamics relaxes in a semiclassical limit. If multiple solutions exist, all are shown to make nonvanishing contributions to physical quantities: multistability does not exist. Nonequilibrium effects are shown to produce decoherence, causing the standard expansions to converge and preventing the formation of a polaron feature in the spectral function. The formalism also applies to the nonequilibrium Kondo problem.