Useful Links

• Kronig-Penney model Applet. This is an alternative approach to finding molecular wave functions. It solves the Schroedinger eigenvalue equation in a periodic, square potential well system.

• Atomic and molecular orbitals from the Sheffield site. Nice pictures and animations.

• You can view and rotate cubic lattices at this site.

• Band structures of elements a periodic table that shows band structures of all the elements in their solid forms.

• Cambridge site → Brillouin zone construction for 2-D square & hexagonal lattice lattice.

• Wien 2k developer website.

• Bilbao crystal server. Find space groups and reciprocal lattices.

• Portland State U's Crystallographic database. Get cif files for free!

• Pictures of different lattice types; rotatable. - good site, but now being revamped, it seems

• Applet that demonstrates the construction of the first few Brillouin zones of a 2-D square lattice. Also discusses the Fermi surface. : I'm having trouble with this site - problem?

• Nice compilation of semiconductor properties from the Ioffe Institute in Russia

• Java applet with interactive features demonstrating acoustic and optic phonon modes of diatomic chain.

• Dispersion relations and animations of phonon modes in several different crystals. Also surface phonons.

• Webelements is a great periodic table with easy-to-access properties, electron configurations, group and period trends, etc.
• Lots of materials data at MatWeb
• Data base of Fermi surfacepictures

• Solid state simulations. Drude model is nice.

• MIT group photonic crystal research. Nice pictures.

• Principles of Semiconductors is a good web book by Bart Van Zeghbroeck of Univ. Colorado. Google his name and you'll find the link. The Wiki wouldn't let me link to it for reasons I don't understand (I get a “spam blocked” error when I try to enter the link).

• another list of links from a similar course.
• The Physics and Chemistry of Color: the 15 Causes of Color by Kurt Nassau (Wiley-Interscience, 2001) is a fascinating book that talks about why things are the colors they are. In the library, & you can browse bits of it on Amazon.com
• Investigating thin film interference with a digital camera, Atkins & Elliot, Am. J. Phys. 78, 1248 (2010) talks about what color a film should be based on its thickness and therefore how interference affects color.

• Roald Hoffmann, How chemistry and physics meet in the solid state, Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. Engl. 26 (1987) 846-878 Link via OSU Library

(a comprehensive look at the first part of this course from a chemist's perspective)

• Roald Hoffmann, A chemical and theoretical way to look at bonding on surfaces, Rev. Mod. Phys. 60 (1988) 601-628 Link via OSU Library

(beyond the scope of this course, but a nice extension of the above to surfaces)

• Bloch oscillations-Hartman - general discussion
• Bloch oscillations-optical analogue
• Bloch oscillations-superlattice

Some links are through the OSU Library Proxy Server; others are direct. Try linking through the OSU Library if you can't read or download journal content.

• Annual Review of Condensed Matter Physics is a new addition to the “Annual Review” Series of journals (also Mat. Sci , Chemistry etc). A good place to find summaries of quickly-developing fields by very respected authors.

• Nature Materials is a monthly journal devoted to the latest-breaking news on new materials.

• Nanoletters is a monthly journal specifically addressing physics and chemistry, of nanomaterials and nanodevices.

• Physical Review Online. Phys. Rev. Lett. usually features articles on hot, new materials, but materials is by no means its focus. Phys. Rev. B is devoted to solid state physics.

Mathematica (by Wolfram) is one of several extremely useful software programs that is useful for simple visualization of functions, computer-aided algebra, and is also a vehicle for very sophisticated programming. I highly recommend you use it for classwork, for research and for fun. As long as you are an OSU student, you are permitted a free copy for use on your own computer. Here is a link to a page I wrote for my PH424 physics class describing how to get access, how to use Wolfram's fantastic documentation and tutorials, and I added a few simple templates.

Here are some Mathematica notebooks that I wrote that are relevant to PH575.

• visualization of spherical harmonics
• visualization of s and p orbitals (real combinations of spherical harmonics)