Lattice polaron formation: Effects of non-screened electron-phonon interaction

We explore the quasiparticle properties of lattice polarons on the basis of a quite general electron-phonon Hamiltonian with a long-range displacement-type of interaction. To treat the dynamical quantum phonons without significant loss of accuracy we adapt an exact Lanczos diagonalization method and compute various static and dynamical quantities, such as the electron-lattice correlation function, the polaron band dispersion, the effective polaron mass, the kinetic energy, the single-particle spectral function, and the optical conductivity, on finite one-dimensional lattices for a wide range of model parameters. We compare the results with those obtained for the standard Holstein model with short-range electron-phonon interaction only.