Interplay between electron-phonon and electron-electron interactions

We discuss the interplay between electron–electron and electron–phonon interactions for alkali‐doped fullerides and high temperature superconductors. Due to the similarity of the electron and phonon energy scales, retardation effects are small for fullerides. This raises questions about the origin of superconductivity, since retardation effects are believed to be crucial for reducing effects of the Coulomb repulsion in conventional superconductors. We demonstrate that by treating the electron–electron and electron–phonon interactions on an equal footing, superconductivity can be understood in terms of a local pairing. The Jahn–Teller character of the important phonons in fullerides plays a crucial role for this result. To describe effects of phonons in cuprates, we derive a t–J model with phonons from the three‐band model. Using exact diagonalization for small clusters, we find that the anomalous softening of the half‐breathing phonon as well as its doping dependence can be explained. By comparing the solution of the t–J model with the Hartree–Fock approximation for the three‐band model, we address results obtained in the local‐density approximation for cuprates. We find that genuine many‐body results, due to the interplay between the electron–electron and electron–phonon interactions, play an important role for the the results in the t–J model. (© 2005 WILEY‐VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim)