Ubiquity of bound states for the strongly coupled polaron

Abstract We study the spectrum of the Fröhlich Hamiltonian for the polaron at fixed total momentum. We prove the existence of excited eigenvalues between the ground state energy and the essential spectrum at strong coupling. In fact, our main result shows that the number of excited energy bands diverges in the strong coupling limit. To prove this we derive upper bounds for the min-max values of the corresponding fiber Hamiltonians and compare them with the bottom of the essential spectrum, a lower bound on which was recently obtained by Brooks and Seiringer (Comm. Math. Phys. 404:1 (2023), 287–337). The upper bounds are given in terms of the ground state energy band shifted by momentum-independent excitation energies determined by an effective Hamiltonian of Bogoliubov type.