Coupling of Hubbard fermions with phonons in La2 CuO4: A combined study using density-functional theory and the generalized tight-binding method

• Electron-phonon interaction in strongly correlated electron systems is analyzed.
• Interaction parameters between strongly correlated electrons and phonons are obtained.
• The suppression of these parameters by strong electron correlations is demonstrated.

We present results for the electron-phonon interaction of the Γ-point phonons in the tetragonal high-temperature phase of La2 CuO4 obtained from a hybrid scheme, combining density-functional theory (DFT) with the generalized tight-binding approach. As a starting point, eigenfrequencies and eigenvectors for the Γ-point phonons are determined from DFT within the frozen phonon approach utilizing the augmented plane wave + local orbitals method. The so obtained characteristics of electron-phonon coupling are converted into parameters of the generalized tight-binding method. This approach is a version of cluster perturbation theory and takes the strong on-site electron correlations into account. The obtained parameters describe the interaction of phonons with Hubbard fermions which form quasiparticle bands in strongly correlated electron systems. As a result, it is found that the Γ-point phonons with the strongest electron-phonon interaction are the A2u modes (236 cm−1, 131 cm−1 and 476 cm−1). Finally it is shown, that the single-electron spectral-weight redistribution between different Hubbard fermion quasiparticles results in a suppression of electron-phonon interaction which is strongest for the triplet Hubbard band with z oriented copper and oxygen electrons.