Useful Links

• Wien 2k developer website.
• Band structures of elements a periodic table that shows band structures of all the elements in their solid forms.
• 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.

• A nice site with structure information for the perovskite, pyrochlore, rutile & spinel structures

• A succinct introduction to crystallography by J.R. Connolly for people with little background in crystallography.

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

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

• Crystallographic and Crystallochemical Database for Minerals and their Structural Analogues. Maintained by the Russian Academy of Sciences. Space groups, Wyckoff positions, diffraction info for minerals. Searchable periodic table.

• 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 (requires Java).

• Nice compilation of semiconductor properties from the Ioffe Institute in Russia
• For II-VI (and other) semiconductors, see the page by D. W. Palmer

• 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.

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. Of the Phys. Rev. journals, Phys. Rev. B is the most comprehensive one that is devoted to solid state physics. Physical Review Applied is a new (2014) Phys. Rev. journal covering materials science, surface and interface physics, device physics, condensed matter physics and optics, nanoscience and nanotechnology.

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
• molecular orbitals - MOs of 5 atoms in a line. Use s or p, and pick mode.
• 2D square lattice dispersion

Not part of the course, but watch these for relevant topics …

• The physics Solid State and Optics Seminar meets W 4:00 - 5:00 pm in WGR 304.
• The Materials Science Seminar meets Th 3:00 - 4:00 pm in Weniger 149 (S14 focus is on computational nuclear materials).
• The physics colloquium meets M 4:00 - 5:00 pm in WGR 116.
• Chemistry seminars are sometimes relevant (times vary).