Effect of electron-electron interactions on the transport properties of doped systems

The current state of the art ab initio computational tools to probe the transport properties of the interacting electron-phonon system often include electron-phonon, anharmonic phonon, and defect interactions. One such tool is the elphbolt code [1] which can further take into account the self-consistent momentum feedback loop between the electron and phonon subsystems, capturing the so-called mutual drag effect [2]. The role of the electron-electron interactions on the drag effect, however, has so far been impossible to capture within the context of ab initio transport solvers. In this work, we show how we can fill this methodological gap. We first present an extension of the coupled electron-phonon Boltzmann transport equations to include the electron-electron interactions. We then discuss the role of these on the dragful transport in doped systems. This work advances one of the current frontiers of ab initio transport computations by completing the momentum flow circuit in the interacting electron-phonon system.

[1] Protik, Nakib H., et al. "The elphbolt ab initio solver for the coupled electron-phonon Boltzmann transport equations." npj Computational Materials 8.1 (2022): 28.

[2] Gurevich, Yu G., and O. L. Mashkevich. "The electron-phonon drag and transport phenomena in semiconductors." Physics Reports 181.6 (1989): 327-394.