  The study of bond alternation in one-dimensional electronic systems has had a
long history. Theoretical work in the 1930s predicted the absence of bond
alternation in the limit of infinitely long conjugated polymers; a result later
contradicted by experimental investigations. When this issue was re-examined in
the 1950s it was shown in the adiabatic limit that bond alternation occurs for
any value of electron-phonon coupling. The question of whether this conclusion
remains valid for quantized nuclear degrees of freedom was first addressed in
the 1980s. Since then a series of numerical calculations on models with gapped,
dispersionless phonons have suggested that bond alternation is destroyed by
quantum fluctuations below a critical value of electron-phonon coupling. In
this work we study a more realistic model with gapless, dispersive phonons. By
solving this model with the DMRG method we show that bond alternation remains
robust for any value of electron-phonon coupling.
