Solution

ID: past-exam-of-the-chemistry-a-course-of-the-university-of-cambridge/2022/paper-2/a9/b/ii/2/solution

With mixing and , the equal-on-site-energy result is
For the regime considered in part (iii), the crossing becomes an avoided crossing with gap at . The lower band has its maximum there and the upper band its minimum. Their orbital characters exchange smoothly across this region, with equal weights at its centre. The lower-right panel gives the sketch.
The zero-mixing limit recovers the crossing of case (1). A useful special limiting case is , where the square root is independent of wavevector and both bands are flat at . This flat-band limit is outside the strict assumption made in part (iii).

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