Other Techniques for Calculating Semiconductor Band Structure

This chapter will expand our toolbox to include a few other techniques for calculating the band structure of a III–V semiconductor: the empirical tight-binding method, its effective bond-orbital form for zinc-blende materials, and the pseudopotential method. These methods allow the band structure over the full Brillouin zone to be described quantitatively using a limited set of parameters. It also answers the question of how easy it is to relate the parameters for each of the computational approaches to measurable quantities such as the gaps and effective masses.