Erratum: Electron-phonon interactions from first principles [Rev. Mod. Phys. (2017) 89 (15003) DOI: 10.1103/RevModPhys.89.015003)

Abstract

This article reviews the theory of electron-phonon interactions in solids from the point of view of ab initio calculations. While the electron-phonon interaction has been studied for almost a century, predictive nonempirical calculations have become feasible only during the past two decades. Today it is possible to calculate from first principles many materials properties related to the electron-phonon interaction, including the critical temperature of conventional superconductors, the carrier mobility in semiconductors, the temperature dependence of optical spectra in direct and indirect-gap semiconductors, the relaxation rates of photoexcited carriers, the electron mass renormalization in angle-resolved photoelectron spectra, and the nonadiabatic corrections to phonon dispersion relations. In this article a review of the theoretical and computational framework underlying modern electron-phonon calculations from first principles as well as landmark investigations of the electron-phonon interaction in real materials is given. The first part of the article summarizes the elementary theory of electron-phonon interactions and their calculations based on density-functional theory. The second part discusses a general field-theoretic formulation of the electron-phonon problem and establishes the connection with practical first-principles calculations. The third part reviews a number of recent investigations of electron-phonon interactions in the areas of vibrational spectroscopy, photoelectron spectroscopy, optical pectroscopy, transport, and superconductivity.