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. 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 World1. 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