For , the two wavenumbers nearly coincide:
Consequently and . To leading order the complete wavefunction is
The small fractional change in kinetic energy scarcely changes the propagation wavenumber, so reflection vanishes and the particle behaves approximately as a free right-moving plane wave. A more accurate phase at large positive retains on the transmitted side; even a small wavenumber difference accumulates over a sufficiently long distance.
The time-independent Schrödinger equation is the energy eigenvalue equation for a particle of mass . The Hamiltonian operator is the sum of the kinetic operator and the prescribed potential energy . Here is the reduced Planck constant. A corresponding stationary state is . The Born rule identifies as probability density for a state with wavefunction normalization ; integrating it over an interval gives a position probability. A plane wave scattering state is not a normalizable wavefunction on the whole line, but its probability currents give the reflection and transmission fractions of an incident wave packet.
There is a notation discrepancy in the sources: the original PDF prints an unbarred in the kinetic term, whereas the local TeX uses . The standard physical equation uses the reduced Planck constant , where is the Planck constant; that convention is used below. Reading the printed literally as the Planck constant would scale all lengths in this model by relative to the standard answers, but would leave the amplitude ratios unchanged.
For , both sides allow oscillatory wavefunctions. A classical particle always crosses the potential step and slows because its kinetic energy falls from to . In quantum mechanics there is generally both reflection and transmission even though the particle is above the step. Define the positive wavenumbers
With no wave incident from the right, write
A finite potential step with constant mass makes both the wavefunction and its first derivative continuous. The two boundary conditions at are
Solving gives the reflected and transmitted wavefunctions
For the specified electron energies, , so the relative probability amplitudes are
The transmitted probability amplitude exceeding one is compatible with conservation of quantum probability, since the outgoing speed is smaller. In fact the probability current gives
These are the quantum reflection probability and transmission probability, which must be distinguished from the requested relative amplitudes.
The photon wavelength is . The exact half-period zone radii for incident plane waves are chosen so that the path to the axial focus increases by per zone:
Transmit alternate zones and block the others, with . For , . The number of zones is a design choice: 100 zones give outer radius and outermost width about . Adjacent open zones then arrive in phase at the principal focus.
Figure 1. . Original illustrative binary amplitude plate with twelve zones for legibility; the numerical design in the solution uses one hundred zones. Boundary radii follow the derived half-period optical-path condition. Details.
The blocking material must be sufficiently opaque at 35 keV; no attenuation coefficient or fabrication thickness is specified. A binary amplitude plate also has zero-order transmission and other odd-order foci, so an aperture/order stop may be needed. The principal focal length is chromatic, varying as for fixed radii.
Write , , and , with constant. Discarding products of perturbations in the vorticity equation gives
Introduce the streamfunction convention
It enforces incompressibility identically. The linear partial differential equation is
For the plane wave , put . Substitution yields
The first term is the Doppler shift by the background flow; the second is the intrinsic Rossby wave frequency. The source's convention selects representatives of real waves, rather than making this expression nonnegative for arbitrary . For and , nonzero positive frequency requires ; the conjugate mode has opposite signs of and describes the same real field.
Use two plane waves, and , as a basis near their Bragg degeneracy. The potential has Fourier coefficients ; its zero Fourier coefficient vanishes. All other plane waves are off resonance and are neglected in the leading nearly-free electron model. With , the Schrödinger equation reduces to the Hermitian matrix problem
Setting the characteristic polynomial equal to zero gives
Solving this quadratic equation gives
For the real cosine potential its coefficient is real; the absolute-value form also allows an arbitrary choice of origin and corresponding Fourier phase.
At the Brillouin-zone boundary, , the free energies are equal. The two standing waves have different probability densities relative to the lattice potential and are split by
Repeating this avoided crossing at the reciprocal lattice boundaries joins smooth branches into energy bands. In one dimension a nonzero Fourier coefficient opens a gap at the corresponding crossing. In higher dimensions a direct gap at one wavevector need not give a common forbidden energy interval at every wavevector: different bands may still overlap in energy. The present two-dimensional example remains metallic even though the crossings are locally gapped.
For the rectangular lattice, choose real-space primitive vectors and . The reciprocal lattice vectors are
Define the half-widths of the first Brillouin zone by and . Their values and the zone are
A primitive reciprocal cell can be drawn with a corner at the origin; its centred translate is the first Brillouin zone here. Its area is .
Figure 1.
Real-space primitive cell and reciprocal-space first Brillouin zone
. Details.
Including both spin states, counting the occupied free-electron states per unit area gives
Consequently
The occupied disk has precisely the area of the first Brillouin zone, but their shapes differ: . It protrudes through both vertical zone boundaries and does not reach the horizontal ones. Thus two electrons per cell do not imply a filled first band in the absence of a separating band gap.
Fold the protruding caps by . The original circle and the translated circle intersect at , . The potential mixes these states and replaces each crossing by an avoided crossing. The lower branch reconnects into two open sheets running across successive zones in the direction; the upper branch forms a closed lens-shaped pocket about a vertical zone boundary. In a reduced-zone sketch its two halves sit at opposite edges, but periodic identification makes them one closed sheet. This is rectangular-lattice Fermi-surface reconstruction.
Figure 2.
Free and reconstructed Fermi contours: two open sheets and one closed pocket per reciprocal cell
. Details.
The largest pocket in this weak-potential construction is the lens-shaped intersection of two disks enclosed by the intersecting free circles. Each has radius and their centres are separated by . If , two sectors minus their two triangles give the lens bound on a reconstructed Fermi pocket:
Opening a gap raises the upper branch at fixed chemical potential and shrinks its pocket. The reported quantum oscillation area satisfies
It is therefore consistent with this closed sheet. Onsager quantization gives . An orbit on this closed contour can return to itself under the Lorentz force and occupy quantized Landau levels. The open sheets do not enclose a finite orbit area for a perpendicular field in this two-dimensional model. The observation is consistent with the reconstructed pocket, without uniquely determining a completely arbitrary band structure.
For a quantitative rough coupling estimate, use the supplied fixed-chemical-potential approximation and retain the two waves coupled by . Write
Their upper eigenvalue is
Setting it equal to gives the pocket boundary
Its intersection with occurs at , where
The two-wave estimate of a Bragg-gap coupling from a pocket area therefore uses
At this reproduces the lens bound on a reconstructed Fermi pocket; the pocket disappears at . Numerical integration gives and . Matching the measured area gives , so the justified rough result is
This estimate neglects remote plane-wave admixtures and other Fourier coefficients. It also holds the chemical potential fixed as requested; an exact fixed-density calculation would determine it self-consistently after reconstruction. The numerical root is a way to implement the approximate model, not a measurement of to four significant figures.
In the Lorentz oscillator model, each participating bound electron is displaced by an applied electric field against a restoring force. The model replaces complicated interband transitions by a driven damped harmonic oscillator. If is the electron displacement along the field and the electron charge is , its equation of motion is
Here describes binding and describes loss of coherent motion. For , the complex amplitude is
The induced electric dipole moment is , so the electric polarization amplitude for number density is
Using gives
The paper's is this dimensionless relative permittivity, rather than the absolute permittivity . Independent classes of bound electrons contribute additive susceptibilities, usually with different resonance frequencies and optical oscillator strengths.
Writing separates the response into
At zero frequency the real part is and the imaginary part vanishes. Near resonance the imaginary part has a positive photon absorption peak and the real part changes rapidly, passing through at . Above resonance the real part can become negative when damping is sufficiently weak; at very high frequency it approaches from below while the imaginary part tends to zero. Finite damping removes the undamped divergence.
For a nonmagnetic material take the passive square-root branch , with . A plane wave then has an intensity attenuation coefficient . Thus the imaginary permittivity expresses dissipation, whereas the actual photon absorption coefficient is determined by the imaginary refractive index. The normal-incidence power reflectance is
A large refractive-index mismatch produces wave reflection even without loss. In the undamped model between and , so the field is evanescent and wave reflection is total in a semi-infinite sample. With damping the response includes both wave reflection and photon absorption; a peak in the imaginary permittivity should not simply be identified with a reflectance peak.
To infer the short-wavelength background from , assume weak photon absorption and take the physical semiconductor branch . Then
so
This is an estimate of the valence-electron background in a frequency window above the doped-carrier response and below the effective bound-electron resonance. One reflectance value alone does not determine both parts of a complex dielectric constant. Even for real , a reciprocal-index branch gives the same ; the ordinary background index greater than unity selects the branch used here.
Using the supplied conventional cubic lattice parameter, the participating valence-electron number density is
Using for the stipulated free-electron comparison gives
An angular frequency “in eV” means its quantum energy , not . No doped-carrier effective mass should be inserted into this valence-electron count.
The low-frequency limit of the bound-electron contribution obeys
Consequently
This effective resonance is much larger than the quoted band gap. There is no contradiction: the single oscillator has been assigned the strength of all sixteen participating valence electrons per conventional cell, whereas the band gap is only the lowest interband excitation threshold. A real spectrum distributes optical oscillator strength over many transitions. Equating the oscillator resonance to the lowest threshold would misrepresent the assumed background response. Here “low frequency” means low relative to ; the static response of the doped conducting sample also contains its free carriers.
The additional mobile carriers in doped indium antimonide contribute a Drude frequency response, obtained by setting their restoring frequency to zero. At infrared frequencies well below the effective valence resonance, the sum is approximately
At the shorter wavelengths the carrier term is small and approaches the background value. As wavelength increases, the negative free-carrier contribution lowers the real permittivity towards unity. For weak damping, refractive-index matching to vacuum gives the Drude-Lorentz reflectivity minimum at
This minimum is near , not its zero. At the slightly lower screened plasma frequency , the real permittivity crosses zero; at longer wavelengths it becomes negative and the material becomes strongly reflective. Finite damping prevents a perfectly vanishing minimum and rounds the edge. At still lower frequency the large conducting response also drives towards unity.
Figure 2.
Illustrative Drude-Lorentz reflectivity minimum: increasing carrier density shifts the minimum to shorter wavelengths
. Details.
For fixed carrier effective mass and background permittivity, and . The observed shift of the minimum towards shorter wavelength as doping increases is therefore the expected free-carrier trend. The figure is an original model illustration, not a digitization or quantitative fit of the supplied curves; the carrier effective mass, damping and their density dependence have not been specified.
In the nearly-free electron model, a weak periodic potential has Fourier components that couple plane waves at and . Far from a degeneracy their admixture gives small perturbative energy shifts. At a Bragg plane, however,
so degenerate perturbation theory is required. In one dimension the first such crossing is at , the boundary of the first Brillouin zone.
Within the degenerate pair the eigenvalues are . Thus
The eigenstates are standing-wave combinations of counterpropagating waves. Their charge densities sit differently relative to the ionic potential, giving different potential energies and removing the free-electron degeneracy. The resulting avoided crossing produces continuous allowed energy bands separated by a forbidden interval. A Fourier component or symmetry-allowed coupling is needed: geometry alone does not require every possible gap to be nonzero.
Write for the coupling Fourier coefficient, with for the supplied cosine potential. Projecting the Schrödinger equation onto the two retained plane waves gives
The diagonal potential average is zero. The characteristic equation is
so the nearly-free electron dispersion near a one-dimensional band gap is
Only the coupling magnitude enters the energies; its sign changes the standing-wave eigenvectors. The two-wave truncation is controlled near this crossing when , since the other plane waves are separated by much larger kinetic energies.
For a Lagrangian density depending on , , and , direct variation gives
Take to have compact support, so every boundary term vanishes. One integration by parts for the first-derivative terms and two for the second-derivative term yield the Euler-Lagrange field equation with second derivatives
The plus sign on the last term is essential. For the action in a, it is particularly transparent to vary the Laplacian directly:
Thus the classical equation of motion is
Here is the biharmonic operator. Substitution of the plane wave gives
A real classical solution combines complex-conjugate plane waves. Quantization assigns the positive branch to the excitation energy, giving the required dispersion relation. The negative-frequency branch supplies the creation operator part of the field, rather than negative excitation energy. Independently, the Hamiltonian in a gives , , confirming the same sign.
Variation of the action with respect to the independent Dirac adjoint gives . The gamma matrices chosen in a make the Dirac equation
Multiplication by gives the equivalent Dirac Hamiltonian form
For a plane wave , where is the signed one-dimensional momentum, the equation is
A nonzero spinor exists precisely when the determinant vanishes:
For , one possible unnormalized spinor solution is . Alternatively, follows from the Pauli matrix multiplication law, proving the same relativistic energy-momentum relation. Acting on the Dirac equation with also shows that each component satisfies , the Klein-Gordon equation.
Continue with . Along a characteristic , the chain rule gives
Thus the initial wave packet evolves as . Similarly, along , the left component is constant, giving
A feature initially at therefore appears at for the right component and for the left component. The profiles translate without changing shape at the speed of light, which is 1 in these units. For positive-energy plane waves, the right component has and the left component has , another way to identify their propagation directions.
The conclusion concerns the massless Dirac equation. For , the components couple as in c, and a positive-energy packet has group velocity , rather than a universal speed . For example, a massive positive-energy rest solution has and , so neither component alone describes an independently moving light-speed packet.
Use periodic plane waves on the ring. For ,
They are orthonormal on one circumference and complete by Fourier series. Thus , with degeneracy : the two signs of nonzero angular momentum have the same energy. Equivalently one may use normalized sine and cosine eigenfunctions for each positive .
For the position measurement put . Direct integration gives
The energy measurement requires projection onto whole degenerate eigenspaces, rather than just onto one traveling wave. The expansion coefficients are
For instance the imaginary integral vanishes by reflection about , and the product-to-sum identity evaluates the real integral as . Consequently
Every numerator is positive and no integer makes a denominator zero, so every energy has nonzero probability. Parseval's identity guarantees that these probabilities sum to one. The supplied state is a valid normalized periodic state; its derivative need not obey the operator-domain periodic condition for the spectral probabilities to be defined.
For the Schrödinger equation with a real scalar potential and no vector potential, the probability current is
Together with the probability density , it satisfies the continuity equation . Substituting gives
A complex wavefunction requires both its real and imaginary parts in the sketch. Choosing the irrelevant constant phase so that is real, they are and , while the probability density is horizontal. It is the spatial phase gradient of a Schrodinger wavefunction that determines the sign of the probability current. In particular, and have the same real part but opposite probability currents, so the slope of the real part cannot determine the direction.
A nonzero plane wave on the whole real line is not square integrable. The displayed density is understood with box normalization, generalized normalization, or as a local description of a broad wave packet; it does not define a normalized probability distribution on the whole line.
Figure 1. . The plotted example has positive wavevector. Reversing the wavevector reverses the imaginary part and the probability current while preserving the real part and the probability density. Details.
Let . For a nonzero symmetric amplitude, substituting the plane wave into the wave equation gives . The gauge condition gives . Thus a propagating mode satisfies
The wavevector is null, so the gravitational wave propagates at the vacuum speed of light. The amplitude is transverse as a four-dimensional tensor in Lorenz gauge in linearized gravity. This condition alone does not set all time components or the trace to zero: residual gauge symmetry of linearized gravity remains. Of the ten symmetric components, four Lorenz constraints and four independent residual coordinate choices leave two physical gravitational wave polarizations.
Separate plane waves in the spinless equation. The transverse operator is , the same shifted oscillator without a Pauli term. Its eigenvalues are . Thus
which is the printed formula for . The absence of the spin splitting is the substantive difference from the Dirac result.
Take the stated static vector potential with zero scalar potential. In the laboratory,
Let move along at the electron's reference velocity . The inverse transformation is . The Lorentz transformation of electromagnetic fields gives
with all other components zero. The sign follows from .
Although an observer fixed in sees an oscillating field, this is not an exact source-free propagating electromagnetic wave. The phase covector has , , so its squared norm is
It is the boost of a static spatial grating, not a null vacuum wave. Equivalently, and is nonzero away from nodes; a vacuum plane wave would have vanishing electromagnetic field invariants. In the ultrarelativistic limit it can be a useful nearly wave-like approximation along the electron's path, but the exact distinction remains.
A charged electron cannot actually maintain the given constant velocity through this nonzero transverse field without an external constraint: the Lorentz force deflects it. The calculation therefore uses the prescribed straight reference trajectory, a weak-deflection approximation, or an instantaneously comoving inertial frame. A globally fixed electron rest frame is not available for its exact deflected motion.
Use and the mostly-plus Minkowski metric. Then the source's Klein-Gordon equation is . For a plane wave , substitution gives
Thus a real propagating wave vector requires , or on restoring units. The positive-energy branch has a rest-energy threshold . At , ; frequencies below the mass threshold give evanescent spatial dependence rather than real-wave-vector propagation. Both signs of occur in the classical equation; a real scalar field combines complex-conjugate modes. Its group velocity is and is subluminal, though the positive-branch phase speed exceeds one when .
For a static spherically symmetric scalar field, the equation outside the source is
Setting gives , so
Decay at infinity selects , the Yukawa potential. It is singular at the origin and describes a point source distributionally; a source-free solution regular at the origin and decaying at infinity must be zero. For , , and decay sets the constant to zero.
For independent , the derivatives needed in the Euler-Lagrange field equation are
Consequently the two conjugate field equations are
Write with real components, and put . Separating real and imaginary parts gives
For each real field take the real part of a complex plane wave amplitude, . With the two equations become
A nonzero normal mode requires their determinant to vanish, so
The positive-frequency Bogoliubov quasiparticle dispersion is therefore
There is also the negative-frequency conjugate solution, as required for real component fields. Since , , consistent with the stability of the chosen uniform ground state.
For this density the Euler-Lagrange field equation with second derivatives gives
Insert a plane wave . The second and fourth spatial derivatives give and , respectively, so
For propagating modes, and the phase velocity has magnitude , which depends on the wave number. Thus the waves are dispersive. For , the squared frequency is negative: the corresponding solutions grow or decay exponentially rather than propagate with a real frequency. The uniform displacement is a zero-frequency shift mode.
A scattering phase shift measures the change of a partial wave's outgoing phase relative to the free radial solution. For a real central potential and elastic scattering, probability conservation gives a unit-modulus Partial-wave S-matrix . Indeed
so the incoming amplitude is unchanged and the outgoing one acquires .
Expanding an incident plane wave in Legendre polynomials and comparing the outgoing spherical wave gives
Use and to remove cross terms:
This is the elastic total scattering cross-section for the one-particle central-potential problem, with no identical-particle symmetrization factor.