Physics 7401, Fall 2014, Homework 6

Due: Wednesday, October 15, 10 pm, in my mailbox (or under my door).

Please explain your work in detail.
In the midterm exam, you will not have access to your books or to your notes. To prepare yourself for
that, I suggest you try the following. First read the relevant parts of your notes and books, copying in
a separate piece of paper any formulas and gures that are referred to in the problem statements. Then
put away all notes and books and try to go as far as possible in solving the homework without consulting
them (or other people). Once you cannot make any more progress, go back to your books/notes, read
about the topics you are having trouble with, and then put them away again, and try again to complete
the homework.
At the top of the rst page of your solution, please leave 5 lines of space for the grades (and any general comments) to be
written. Just after that, please write your answer for question 0 Time spent.
0. Time spent (5 pts.)
In the rst page of your solution, please write a table containing the following information: i) time spent reading
topics related to the class including reading in preparation to solve this homework assignment, ii) time spent working
on each problem (please answer individually for each problem), iii) total time spent on the class since you turned in
your previous homework, including time spent reading or discussing and solving homework, but not time spent in
class.
1. Kronnig-Penney model in real space
(a) (Modied from Marder) Consider an electron in one dimension in the presence of a periodic Kronig-Penney
potential, in the limit of innitely high and narrow barriers:
U(x) = V
0

m
(x ma).
As a reminder, for Schroedingers equation with a delta function potential V (x) = V
0
(x x
0
), it can be
proven that the wave function (x) satises the following conditions: (i) (x) is continuous at x
0
and (ii)

(x
+
0
)

(x

0
) =
2mV0
h
2
(x
0
) (where m is the electron mass).
i. Restrict attention to a single unit cell: 0 x a, consider a linear combination of plane waves e
iKx
and e
iKx
, and write the boundary conditions on Schroedingers equation that lead to Bloch states with
quasimomentum k (which is in general dierent from K). Write the energy of the generic Bloch state in
terms of K, h, m.
ii. Dene W
0

maV0
h
2
, and show that the condition that selects the allowed energy eigenvalues is
cos(ka) =
W
0
Ka
sin(Ka) + cos(Ka).
(b) (Modied from Kittel) Consider the above equation in the case W
0
1.
i. By considering k = 0, nd the energy of the lowest energy eigenstate.
ii. Find the band gap at k = /a.
iii. Sketch the energy as a function of k, for a region including at least the rst and second Brillouin zones. You
should have exactly one energy for each k, (i.e. work in the extended zone scheme).
2. (Marder) Problem 8.1. (Hint: to simplify the calculation in part (a), instead of calculating U
q
as an integral as in
Eq. (7.26), use the fact that 2 cos() = exp(i) + exp(i) and Eq. (7.28).)
3. (Marder) Problem 8.3.