Brillouin zone structure

As has been discussed in great detail, the grating effectively imposes a Brillouin Zone structure upon the surface plasmon dispersion, resulting in various dispersion... 

Effect of Unit Cell Size on Brillouin Zone Structure... 

I be second important practical consideration when calculating the band structure of a malericil is that, in principle, the calculation needs to be performed for all k vectors in the Brillouin zone. This would seem to suggest that for a macroscopic solid an infinite number of ectors k would be needed to generate the band structure. However, in practice a discrete saaipling over the BriUouin zone is used. This is possible because the wavefunctions at points... 

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... 

These surprising results can be understood on the basis of the electronic structure of a graphene sheet which is found to be a zero gap semiconductor [177] with bonding and antibonding tt bands that are degenerate at the TsT-point (zone corner) of the hexagonal 2D Brillouin zone. The periodic boundary... 

Figure 3.27. The first Brillouin zone of the facc-ccntrcd cubic structure, after Pippard.

Fig. 6. Self-consistent band structure (48 valence and 5 conduction bands) for the hexagonal II arrangement of nanotubes, calculated along different high-symmetry directions in the Brillouin zone. The Fermi level is positioned at the degeneracy point appearing between K-H, indicating metallic behavior for this tubule array[17. ...

The quantity x is a dimensionless quantity which is conventionally restricted to a range of —-ir < x < tt, a central Brillouin zone. For the case yj = 0 (i.e., S a pure translation), x corresponds to a normalized quasimomentum for a system with one-dimensional translational periodicity (i.e., x s kh, where k is the traditional wavevector from Bloch s theorem in solid-state band-structure theory). In the previous analysis of helical symmetry, with H the lattice vector in the graphene sheet defining the helical symmetry generator, X in the graphene model corresponds similarly to the product x = k-H where k is the two-dimensional quasimomentum vector of graphene. 

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. 

Fig. 12-3. The One-Dimensional Brillouin Zone for the Paramagnetic and Antiferromagnetic Structures. The point T is at the zone center, the point B is at the edge of the antiferromagnetic zone and the point O is at the edge of the paramagnetic zone. This latter point also corresponds to Hie edge of the second Brillouin zone of the antiferromagnetic lattice.

Finally, this type of analysis can be carried out for any point in the Brillouin zone such that by using the transformation properties of spin waves and the character tables, one may obtain the spin-wave band structure throughout the zone. 

The resonating-valence-bond theory of metals discussed in this paper differs from the older theory in making use of all nine stable outer orbitals of the transition metals, for occupancy by unshared electrons and for use in bond formation the number of valency electrons is consequently considered to be much larger for these metals than has been hitherto accepted. The metallic orbital, an extra orbital necessary for unsynchronized resonance of valence bonds, is considered to be the characteristic structural feature of a metal. It has been found possible to develop a system of metallic radii that permits a detailed discussion to be given of the observed interatomic distances of a metal in terms of its electronic structure. Some peculiar metallic structures can be understood by use of the postulate that the most simple fractional bond orders correspond to the most stable modes of resonance of bonds. The existence of Brillouin zones is compatible with the resonating-valence-bond theory, and the new metallic valencies for metals and alloys with filled-zone properties can be correlated with the electron numbers for important Brillouin polyhedra. 

The brittleness of these intermetallic compounds suggests an electronic structure involving a filled Brillouin zone. It was pointed out by Ketelaar (1937) that the strongest reflection, that of form 531, corresponds to a Brillouin polyhedron for which the inscribed sphere has a volume of 217 electrons per unit cube, which agrees well with the value 216 calculated on the assumption that the sodium atom is univalent and the zinc atoms are bivalent that is, calculated in the usual Hume-Rothery way. It has also been... 

G. Herzberg, Molecular Spectra and Molecular Structure, Vol. II - Infrared and Raman Spectra of Polyatomic Molecules, Van Nostrand Reinhold, New York, 1945 In the crystalline state, it is more convenient to speak about multi-phonon processes since the modes from the whole dispersion range of the first Brillouin zone are allowed to contribute according to the conservation of energy and momentum of the phonons involved in the process... 

Condition (2) is also quite common. For instance, in crystals it results in a reduced sound velocity, v q) when q approaches a boundary of the Brillouin zone [93,96], a direct result of the periodicity of a crystal lattice. In addition, interaction between modes can lead to creation of soft mode with qi O and corresponding structural transitions [97,98]. The importance of nonlocality at fluid interfaces and the corresponding softening of surface modes has been demonstrated recently, both theoretically [99] and experimentally [100]. 

In a cubic-primitive structure (a-polonium, Fig. 2.4, p. 7) the situation is similar. By stacking square nets and considering how the orbitals interact at different points of the Brillouin zone, a qualitative picture of the band structure can be obtained. 

A theoretical interpretation relating the valence electron concentration and the structure was put forward by H. Jones. If we start from copper and add more and more zinc, the valence electron concentration increases. The added electrons have to occupy higher energy levels, i.e. the energy of the Fermi limit is raised and comes closer to the limits of the first Brillouin zone. This is approached at about VEC = 1.36. Higher values of the VEC require the occupation of antibonding states now the body-centered cubic lattice becomes more favorable as it allows a higher VEC within the first Brillouin zone, up to approximately VEC = 1.48. 

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