Ground and excited states of an impurity-bound surface optical polaron

Abstract

The ground and the first two excited states of an extrinsic surface optical polaron bound to a Coulomb impurity near the surface are studied by using a variational method for all ranges of the coupling parameters. It is shown that for large electron-impurity coupling the phonon-induced Lamb shift is quite significant and is opposite in sign as compared to the corresponding shift in the bulk material. © 1993 The American Physical Society.