The effective mass problem for the Landau-Pekar equations

We provide a definition of the effective mass for the classical polaron described by the Landau-Pekar equations. It is based on a novel variational principle, minimizing the energy functional over states with given (initial) velocity. The resulting formula for the polaron's effective mass agrees with the prediction by Landau and Pekar [10].Comment: 14 pages, final version to appear in Journal of Physics