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A variational technique is developed to investigate the low-lying energy levels of a conduction electron in a polar crystal. Because of the strong interaction between the electron and the longitudinal optical mode of the lattice vibrations, perturbation-theoretic methods are inapplicable. Our variational technique, which is closely related to the intermediate method introduced by Tomonaga, is equivalent to a simple canonical transformation. The use of this transformation enables us to obtain the wave functions and energy levels quite simply. Because the recoil of the electron introduces a correlation between the emission of successive virtual phonons by the electron, our approximation, in which this correlation is neglected, breaks down for very strong electron-phonon coupling. The validity of our approximation is investigated and corrections are found to be small for coupling strengths occurring in typical polar crystals.
Lee et al. (Sat,) studied this question.