Electron-phonon coupling close to a metal-insulator transition in one dimension

We consider a one-dimensional system of electrons interacting via a short-range repulsion and coupled to phonons close to the metal-insulator transition at half-filling. We argue that the metal-insulator transition can be described as a standard one-dimensional incommensurate to commensurate transition, even if the electronic system is coupled to the lattice distortion. By making use of known results for this transition, we prove that low-momentum phonons, with the inclusion of the 4k(F) (similar or equal to 2 pi near half-filling) scattering, do not play any relevant role close to the metal-insulator transition, unless their coupling to the electrons is large in comparison with the other energy scales present in the problem. In other words the effective strength of the low-momentum transferred electron-phonon coupling does not increase close to the metal-insulator transition, even though the effective velocity of the mobile carriers is strongly diminished.