Solution

ID: past-exam-of-the-condensed-matter-physics-major-option-course-of-the-university-of-oxford/2015/6/b/solution

One orbital per primitive cell supplies two states per wave vector when spin is included. A monovalent metal therefore half-fills this band. Nearest-neighbor hopping on the bipartite rectangular lattice has for , fixing the half-filled Fermi energy at
For , the two Fermi surface obey
They are corrugated open sheets in an extended-zone description, with ranging from to . They are not a small circular pocket centered at the band bottom. The same maps one Fermi line onto its nested partner. A density-wave or Peierls-like modulation at that wave vector can open additional gaps at the Fermi energy. The unperturbed single-orbital band does not acquire those new gaps without a symmetry-breaking modulation or another coupling; ordinary lattice Bragg effects are already built into its dispersion.
For the three-dimensional tetragonal version set , , . The corresponding half-filled surface is
It is a corrugated periodic surface, not a sphere. At its regular closed contour is electron-like around , with ; at the closed contour is hole-like around , with the sum . The topology switches through the square-lattice separatrix at . Drawing one simple weakly warped cylindrical pocket across every section misses that feature of the half-filled cosine band.
Angle-resolved photoemission can directly map the dispersion and occupied Fermi surface. Angular quantum-oscillation measurements test its closed extremal cross sections and cyclotron masses; momentum-density probes such as positron annihilation or Compton scattering give a complementary bulk test. The different techniques constrain different features rather than merely providing interchangeable pictures.

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