Orbital Approach to the Electronic Structure of Solids

This book provides an intuitive yet sound understanding of how structure and properties of solids may be related. The natural link is provided by the band theory approach to the electronic structure of solids. The chemically insightful concept of orbital interaction and the essential machinery of band theory are used throughout the book to build links between the crystal and electronic structure of periodic systems. In such a way, it is shown how important tools for understanding properties of solids like the density of states, the Fermi surface etc. can be qualitatively sketched and used to either understand the results of quantitative calculations or to rationalize experimental observations. Extensive use of the orbital interaction approach appears to be a very efficient way of building bridges between physically and chemically based notions to understand the structure and properties of solids.

Table of Contents:
1: Elementary introduction to the transport properties of solids 2: Electronic structure of molecules: use of the symmetry 3: Electronic Structure of One-dimensional Systems: Basic Notions 4: Electronic First-order Peierls distortions in periodic 1D systems 5: Application to trans-polyacetylene 6: Handling the symmetry in 1D compounds 7: Application to polyacene 8: Electronic structure of selected inorganic chains 9: Electronic structure of 2D and 3D systems 10: Density of States 11: Fermi surface and Low Dimensional Metals 12: Electron repulsion

About the Author :
Enric Canadell was educated at the Universities of Barcelona and Autónoma de Madrid, conducted research at the Universities of Barcelona, Chicago and Paris -Sud Orsay and since 1996 is Research Professor at the Institut de Ciència de Materials de Barcelona (CSIC). He is mostly interested in the development of ideas to relate the structure and properties of solids. In 1995 was awarded the Rochat-Julliard Prize of the Académie des Sciences de Paris for work on the electronic structure of low dimensional solids. Marie-Liesse Doublet was educated at Université de Paris-Sud Orsay and carried out research at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Institut des Matériaux de Nantes and Université de Montpellier 2 where she is now Directeur de Recherches (CNRS). Her research work deals with the electronic structure of solids with a special interest for energy storage materials. Christophe Iung studied at École Normale Supérieure de St Cloud and holds a Ph. D. from Université de Paris-Sud Orsay. He is now Full Professor and Vice-President of the Education Council of the University of Montpellier 2. His main research interest is in the field of quantum molecular dynamics.

Review :
[T]he authors of this book have provided an accessible introduction to the electronic structure of solids that makes the link between inorganic chemistry and physics. In particular, they show how one can use molecular orbitals (more often considered in chemistry courses than in physics courses) to build up solids and how one can then predict the transport properties ... A particular strength of this book is that a chapter introducing some new bit of theory is frequently followed by a chapter in which the results are applied to a real system. Contemporary Physics The authors build understanding slowly, often dividing more complex systems into chemically meaningful molecular fragments or functional groups, and then showing you how their symmetry-adapted orbitals interact. Frequently looking at orbital loops and drawing them by hand comes with a bonus: not only does it allow you to discover insightful qualitative explanations, but also you build your intuition about what the chemical system will or wont do.The authors know well that one good figure is better than 10 written pages, so the book is rich in simple illustrations (typically two per page), and there are a number of good exercises at the end of each chapter...Overall, this is a great book. Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. This book will be most accessible and useful to chemists, but it would nevertheless be a valuable source of information for researchers from a variety of backgrounds working in this field. Chemistry World