Ground-state energy of strongly bound charged particles on surfaces

Abstract

The strong interaction of a charged particle with the surface excitations in a semi-infinite medium is discussed. Only the example of a particle outside the material and trapped near the surface by its image potential is considered. By adapting a simple unitary transformation formalism, presented for the Feynman polaron model to the present problem, the ground-state energy of a charged particle-surface excitation system is determined. The coupling of a particle to the bulk excitation modes is not treated here.