Slave rotor approach to dynamically screened Coulomb interactions in solids

Recent studies of dynamical screening of the electronic Coulomb interactions in solids have revived interest in lattice models of correlated fermions coupled to bosonic degrees of freedom (Hubbard-Holstein-type models). We propose a new dynamical mean-field-based approach to dynamically screened Coulomb interactions. In the effective Anderson-Holstein model, a transformation to slave rotors [S. Florens and A. Georges, Phys. Rev. B 66, 165111 (2002)10.1103/PhysRevB.66.165111] is performed to decouple the dynamical part of the interaction. This transformation allows for a systematic derivation and analysis of recently introduced approximate schemes for the solution of dynamical impurity problems, in particular, the Bose factor ansatz within the dynamic atomic limit approximation (DALA) with and without Lang-Firsov correction. More importantly still, it suggests an optimized choice for a Bose factor in the sense of the variational principle of Feynman and Peierls. We demonstrate the accuracy of our scheme and present a comparison to calculations within the DALA.