Charge-density-wave formation in a half-filled fermion-boson transport model: A projective renormalization approach

Abstract: We study the metal-insulator transition in a very general two-channel transport model, where charge carriers are coupled to a correlated background medium. The fluctuations of the background were described as bosonic excitations, having the ability to relax. Employing an analytical projector-based renormalization technique, we calculate the ground-state and spectral properties of this fermion-boson model and corroborate recent numerical results, which indicate---in dependence on the `stiffness' of the background medium---a Luttinger-liquid to charge-density-wave transition for the one-dimensional half-filled band case. In particular, we determine the renormalized electron and boson dispersion relations and show that the quantum phase transition is not triggered by a softening of the boson modes. Thus the charge density wave is different in nature from an usual Peierls distorted state.