3/31/11

1st Brillouin Zone

Everything within the lattice may be described as something within the 1st Brillouin zone of the reciprocal lattice, displaced by a vector G. This is how we get the "reflections" in the reduced zone of the energy- k plots seen in the notes and lecture.

4 comments:

  1. Is the first Brillouin zone for a point in a lattice is the set of points that are closer to the point than the Bragg plane of any point?

    ReplyDelete
  2. Yes but remember that the Brillouin zones are in reciprocal space not real space.

    ReplyDelete
  3. The 1st Brillouin zone is just the Wigner-Seitz cell in reciprocal space

    ReplyDelete
  4. I really liked the concept of simply moving all the wavevectors k into the 1st brillouin zone by adding an appropriate reciprocal lattice vector. It's very useful to do so, as we discussed in lectures, because we get a much more compact diagram of the energy bands.

    ReplyDelete