Multiphonon rate equations

The exponential decrease in the multiphonon emission rate with an increasing energy gap, given by Equation (6.1), is due to an increase in the number of emitted... 

A non-perturbative theory of the multiphonon relaxation of a localized vibrational mode, caused by a high-order anharmonic interaction with the nearest atoms of the crystal lattice, is proposed. It relates the rate of the process to the time-dependent non-stationary displacement correlation function of atoms. A non-linear integral equation for this function is derived and solved numerically for 3- and 4-phonon processes. We have found that the rate exhibits a critical behavior it sharply increases near a specific (critical) value(s) of the interaction. 

To calculate the rate of multiphonon emission, let us consider the phonon correlation function D,(t). We proceed from the equation of motion of a phonon... 

An alternative approach widely used in polyatomic molecule studies is based on the Golden Rule and a perturbative treatment of the anharmonic coupling (57,62). This approach is not much used for diatomic molecules. In the liquid O2 example cited above, the Hamiltonian must be expanded to 30th order or so to calculate the multiphonon emission rate. But for vibrations of polyatomic molecules, which can always find relatively low-order VER pathways for each VER step, perturbation theory is very useful. In the perturbation approach, the molecule s entire ladder of vibrational excitations is the system and the phonons are the bath. Only lower-order processes are ordinarily needed (57) because polyatomic molecules have many vibrations ranging from higher to lower frequencies and only a small number of phonons, usually one or two, are excited in each VER step. The usual practice is to expand the interaction Hamiltonian (qn, Q) in Equation (2) in powers of normal coordinates (57,62) ... 

Equations (12.55), sometime referred to as multiphonon transition rates for reasons that become clear below, are explicit expressions for the golden-rule transitions rates between two levels coupled to a boson field in the shifted parallel harmonic potential surfaces model. The rates are seen to depend on the level spacing 21, the normal mode spectrum mo,, the normal mode shift parameters Ao-, the temperature (through the boson populations ) and the nonadiabatic coupling... 

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