Brillouin energy zones

The characteristics of any such solid were shown by Brillouin to occupy only certain energy zones, well defined by the reciprocal lattice. Such zones depend upon the lattice structure and the type of electron bonding present in the solid. Some solids are dielectric, some are semiconducting and others, notably metals, are conductors. 

In fignre A1.3.9 the Brillouin zone for a FCC and a BCC crystal are illustrated. It is a connnon practice to label high-synnnetry point and directions by letters or symbols. For example, the k = 0 point is called the F point. For cubic crystals, there exist 48 symmetry operations and this synnnetry is maintained in the energy bands e.g., E k, k, k is mvariant under sign pennutations of (x,y, z). As such, one need only have knowledge of (k) in Tof the zone to detennine the energy band tlnoughout the zone. The part of the zone which caimot be reduced by synnnetry is called the irreducible Brillouin zone. 

Figure C2.16.5. Calculated plots of energy bands as a function of wavevector k, known as band diagrams, for Si and GaAs. Indirect (Si) and direct (GaAs) gaps are indicated. High-symmetry points of the Brillouin zone are indicated on the wavevector axis.

Fig. 3.16 The efect of introducing a weak potential into the ID lattice is to lift the degeneracy of the energy levels mar to the edge of the Brillouin zone (shown in both extended-zone and reduced-zone representation).

Fig. 3.17 The two possible sets of standing waves at the Brillouin zone boundary. Standing wave A concentrates electron density at the nuclei, whereas wave B concentrates electron density between the nuclei. Wave A thus has a lower energy than wave B.

Once the phonon frequencies are known it becomes possible to determine various thermodynamic quantities using statistical mechanics (see Appendix 6.1). Here again some slight modifications are required to the standard formulae. These modifications are usually a consequence of the need to sum over the points sampled in the Brillouin zone. For example, the zero-point energy is ... 

In Equation (5.58) the outer summation is over the p points q which are used to sample the Brillouin zone, is the fractional weight associated with each point (related to the volume of Brillouin zone space surrounding q) and vi are the phonon frequencies. In addition to the internal energy due to the vibrational modes it is also possible to calculate the vibrational entropy, and hence the free energy. The Helmholtz free energy at a temperature... 

The electronic structure of an infinite crystal is defined by a band structure plot, which gives the energies of electron orbitals for each point in /c-space, called the Brillouin zone. This corresponds to the result of an angle-resolved photo electron spectroscopy experiment. 

Simply doing electronic structure computations at the M, K, X, and T points in the Brillouin zone is not necessarily sufficient to yield a band gap. This is because the minimum and maximum energies reached by any given energy band sometimes fall between these points. Such limited calculations are sometimes done when the computational method is very CPU-intensive. For example, this type of spot check might be done at a high level of theory to determine whether complete calculations are necessary at that level. 

Calculations for Ceo in the LDA approximation [62, 60] yield a narrow band (- 0.4 0.6 eV bandwidth) solid, with a HOMO-LUMO-derived direct band gap of - 1.5 eV at the X point of the fee Brillouin zone. The narrow energy bands and the molecular nature of the electronic structure of fullerenes are indicative of a highly correlated electron system. Since the HOMO and LUMO levels both have the same odd parity, electric dipole transitions between these levels are symmetry forbidden in the free Ceo moleeule. In the crystalline solid, transitions between the direct bandgap states at the T and X points in the cubic Brillouin zone arc also forbidden, but are allowed at the lower symmetry points in the Brillouin zone. The allowed electric dipole... 

It is known that a metallic ID system is unstable against lattice distortion and turns into an insulator. In CNTs instabilities associated two kinds of distortions are possible, in-plane and out-of-plane distortions as shown in Fig. 8. The inplane or Kekuld distortion has the form that the hexagon network has alternating short and long bonds (-u and 2u, respectively) like in the classical benzene molecule [8,9,10]. Due to the distortion the first Brillouin zone reduees to one-third of the original one and both K and K points are folded onto the F point in a new Brillouin zone. For an out-of-plane distortion the sites A and B are displaced up and down ( 2) with respect to the cylindrical surface [11]. Because of a finite curvature of a CNT the mirror symmetry about its surface are broken and thus the energy of sites A and B shift in the opposite direction. 

The pseudopotential density-functional technique is used to calculate total energies, forces on atoms and stress tensors as described in Ref. 13 and implemented in the computer code CASTEP. CASTEP uses a plane-wave basis set to expand wave-functions and a preconditioned conjugate gradient scheme to solve the density-functional theory (DFT) equations iteratively. Brillouin zone integration is carried out via the special points scheme by Monkhorst and Pack. The nonlocal pseudopotentials in Kleynman-Bylander form were optimized in order to achieve the best convergence with respect to the basis set size. 5... 

Wang wa used. The total energies were converged to 0.1 mRy/atom. The number of k points was chosen so as to correspond to 120 points in the irreducible wedge of the Brillouin zone of the fee structure, the energy cut-off was 16 Ry. We have tested various values of these parameters and it turned out that the present choice is sufficient to achieve desired uniform accuracy for all structures. For each structure the total energy was minimized with respect to the lattice constant. These interaction parameters correspond to the locally relaxed parameters and are denoted by superscript CW. 

The results of calculations for the points F—27r/a(0, 0,0) and A —27r/a(0,0.5,0) of the Brillouin zone are listed in Table 1. It can be seen that the energy eigenvsdues differ, on the average, by S Q Ryd between the two csdculations. Such an accuracy is quite sufficient for most applications. The qualitative picture of the electron spectrum is in complete agreement with our previous SPRKKR calculation. 

Calculations were done with a full-potential version of the LMTO method with nonoverlapping spheres. The contributions from the interstitial region were accounted for by expanding the products of Hankel functions in a series of atom-ce- -ered Hankels of three different kinetic energies. The corrected tetrahedron method was used for Brillouin zone integration. Electronic exchange and correlation contributions to the total energy were obtained from the local-density functional calculated by Ceperley and Alder " and parametrized by Vosko, Wilk, and Nusair. ... 

We use s, p, and d partial waves, 16 energy points on a semi circular contour, 135 special k-points in the l/12th section of the 2D Brillouin zone and 13 plane waves for the inter-layer scattering. The atomic wave functions were determined from the scalar relativistic Schrodinger equation, as described by D. D. Koelling and B. N. Harmon in J. Phys. C 10, 3107 (1977). 

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