Polarons in Bulk Materials and Systems with Reduced Dimensionality

An enormous theoretical effort has been made to treat electron-phonon coupled systems, with particular emphasis on Many Body aspects for dense electron systems, taking into account continuum as well as lattice polaron effects. Treating such aspects of polaron theory has been made possible because of powerful Many Body techniques which include: Exact Diagonalization techniques, Quantum Monte Carlo approaches, Density Matrix renormalization group and Dynamical Mean Field Theory. All these advances in polaron theory needed to be accompanied by: an equally important advance in material research which produced many new materials such as the high Tc cuprates, the manganites and nickelates and the fullerines; as well as significant advances in the refinement of experimental analysis and, in particular, the spectroscopic means such as Angel Resolved Photoemission Spectroscopy, X Ray Absorption Spectroscopy (EXAFS, XANES), Pulsed Neutron Diffraction measurements allowing to study the local dynamical lattice de-formations and optical spectroscopy including time resolved measurements. The scope and purpose of this publication is to review both these theoretical and experimental advances which occurred over the last few decades and to introduce the study of such systems, where both strong electron-electron correlations and large electron-phonon coupling strengths play important roles.