Vibrational Properties of Solids

Methods in Computational Physics, Volume 15: Vibrational Properties of Solids explores the application of computational methods to delineate microscopic vibrational behavior. This book is composed of nine chapters that further illustrate the utility of these methods to ordered lattices, quantum solids, impurity modes, surface modes, and amorphous solids. The opening chapters present the basic theoretical models and their computational aspects for different solids of diverse chemical nature, together with some methods of automation and computation in the highly sophisticated experiments in inelastic scattering of neutrons. These topics are followed by a discussion on how group theoretical methods treated by computers can yield the proper symmetry assignments of phonon eigenvalues and eigenstates. Considerable chapters are devoted to the different applications of traditional lattice dynamics, each having its own computational ramification. Other chapters survey the properties of solids that mostly involve integrations over the Brillouin zone. The last chapter concerns the dynamic or time-dependent aspect of lattice dynamics, namely, the calculation of thermal and electric conductivities in some models of solids. This book is of great benefit to geoscientists, physicists, and mathematicians.