Intermittent polaron dynamics: Born-Oppenheimer approximation out of equilibrium

We consider a model of a molecular switch that consists of an electronic orbital strongly interacting with a local vibrational mode. The strong polaronic interaction prevents perturbative treatment of the problem. Instead, we find that in an adiabatic regime when the electronic dynamics is faster than the vibrational frequency, it is possible to provide a fully nonperturbative treatment of the nonequilibrium properties of the system. The results shows intermittent switching between bistable states of the oscillator with an effective random telegraph noise.