  From electronic structure calculations, we find that carriers injected into
dangling-bond atomic wires on the Si(001) surface will self-trap to form
localised polaron states. The self-trapping distortion takes the form of a
local suppression of the buckling of the dimers in the wire, and is
qualitatively different for the electron and hole polarons. This result points
to the importance of polaronic effects in understanding electronic motion in
such nanostructures.
