Many-body Theory of a Rapidly Varying Inhomogeneous Electron Gas

Book excerpt: The case of an inhomogeneous electron gas within which the density variation is significant over a spatial range of the order of a Fermi wave-length is considered in this report. It is seen that for most systems of physical interest, this sort of non-uniformity is a result of diffraction effects. This is a fundamentally different phenomenon than can reasonably be treated by the density gradient method of Kohn for slowly varying inhomogeneous electron gases. Several sample cases are treated. The first considerations are directed towards the problem of a weak periodic potential in an interacting electron gas. The momentum-dependent self-energy is calculated for an electron propagating in the many-body medium of an electron gas plus a periodic lattice pseudo-potential. This is the equivalent of a quasi-particle energy spectrum and thus an orthogonalized plane wave energy band. It does not appear that the lattice drastically changes qualitative aspects of plane wave many-body theory. A dielectric formulation for a general inhomogeneous electron gas is presented. By introducing a new image technique, the dielectric function within the random phase approximation, which is valid in the surface region of an electron gas, is obtained. A Green's function formalism is developed for treating the static dielectric screening of a point impurity in an electron gas. The surface dielectric function is used with the impurity screening formalism to treat the problem of impurity screening in the surface region. This is an idealized model of ionic adsorption on metal surface. Screening charge densities resulting from volume polarization effects are calculated. From these results, it is seen why unjustifiable application of classical image forces in previous adsorption theories has fortunately produced reasonable results. A new method for obtaining the appropriate plasmon contribution to the electron self-energy in the surface region is developed. With these results, the electron gas surface potentials calculated by Loucks and Cutler are then improved.