Effects of positron phonon interaction in metals

Abstract

We investigate the importance of positron phonon interaction for the many body effects observed in positron annihilation in metals. The interaction is formulated as the screened Coulomb interaction of the positron with the polarization charge of the metal produced by lattice vibrations. The phonon contribution to the effective mass is found negligibly small. Due to the interaction with phonons the equilibrium positron momentum distribution deviates from a Boltzmann distribution leading to a larger thermal smearing of the annihilation curves than expected from the rather small effective mass. The positron energy loss in the thermalization process due to phonon excitation is discussed and found comparable to the energy loss due to the excitation of electron hole pairs in the experimentally interesting temperature range.