Equivalence of Two Definitions of the Effective Mass of a Polaron

Two definitions of the effective mass of a particle interacting with a quantum field, such as a polaron, are considered and shown to be equal in models similar to the Fröhlich polaron model. These are: 1. the mass defined by the low momentum energy E(P)≈E(0)+P ²/2M of the translation invariant system constrained to have momentum P and 2. the mass M of a simple particle in an arbitrary slowly varying external potential, V, described by the nonrelativistic Schrödinger equation, whose ground state energy equals that of the combined particle/field system in a bound state in the same V.