2.5: The Density of States
- Page ID
- 50020
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To determine whether a material is a metal or an insulator, and to calculate the magnitude of the current under applied bias, we need the density of states (DOS), which as you recall is a measure of the number of states in a conductor per unit energy. In this part, we will calculate the DOS for a variety of different conductors.
To calculate the density of states we will employ two assumptions: (i) we will model the conductor as a homogeneous box, and (ii) we will assume periodic boundary conditions.