Student Video 2D Brillouin Zones
JURGIS RUZA: In this demonstration, I'm going to show you how to construct 2D Brillouin zones and hopefully achieve a better understanding of them and what they are. So a Brillouin zone is an important concept in material science and solid state physics alike because it is used to describe the behavior of an electron in a perfect crystal system. So what is a Brillouin zone? A Brillouin zone is a particular choice of the unit cell of the reciprocal lattice. It is defined as the Wigner-Seitz cell of the reciprocal lattice. It is constructed as the set of points enclosed by the Bragg planes-- the planes perpendicular to a connection line from the origin to each lattice point passing through the midpoint. Alternatively, it is defined as the set of points closer to the origin than to any other reciprocal lattice point. The whole reciprocal space may be covered without overlap with copies of such Brillouin zone. OK. So that was a rather convoluted definition. Let's do i...