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Charge density waves

Elasticity theory for the CDW is considerably simplified by the strong anisotropy. In particular, since the electrons in the CDW are essentially confined on the chains, we need only keep track of displacements in the x-direction, i.e. along the most conducting axis. Because of this simplicity, we may define instead a single, dimensionless phase by tex2html_wrap_inline3464 , where tex2html_wrap_inline3466 is the displacement along the x direction. By a rescaling of axes, we may then write the elastic CDW Hamiltonian as

  equation1081

where K is the elastic stiffness.



Leon Balents
Thu May 30 08:21:44 PDT 1996