Elasticity driven self-organization of polarons

We use a strain description to couple long-range elastic fields adiabatically to electronic density to describe the behavior of a quantum particle in an elastic medium. We show that in this generalization of the Holstein polaron problem, a bound polaronic state results with strong long-range angular dependence in the elastic fields, but a localized electronic core. The deformation of the elastic fields creates an anisotropic, indirect interaction between polarons extending to large distances. For a given density of polarons, this interaction favors the formation of strings of polarons in preferred directions.