The purpose of this tutorial is to show how ATK can be used to compute accurate electronic structure, optical, and dielectric properties of semiconductors from DFT combined with the meta-GGA functional by Tran and Blaha [1] (TB09). TB09 is a semi-empirical functional that is fitted to give a good description of the band gaps in non-metals. The results obtained with the method are often comparable with very advanced many-body calculations, however with a computational expense comparable with LDA, i.e. several order of magnitudes faster. Thus, the meta-GGA functional is a very practical tool for obtaining a good description of the electronic structure of insulators and semiconductors.
It is important to note that the TB09 functional does not provide accurate total energies [1], and it can therefore only be used for calculating the electronic structure of the materials, while the GGA-PBE functional should be used for computing total energies and atomic geometries.
It is assumed that you are familiar with the general workflow of VNL, as described in the Basic VNL and ATK Tutorial.
This tutorial uses silicon as an example. As for most semiconductors, GGA/LDA both severely underestimate the Si band gap (between 0.5 and 0.6 eV), while the experimental band gap of 1.18 eV is reproduced almost exactly by TB09. The experimental dielectric constant is also reproduced by the optical properties module in ATK to within a few percent.
Electronic structure and optical properties of silicon
Setting up the calculation
Start VNL, create a new project and give it a name, then select it and click Open. Launch the Builder by pressing the builder_icon icon on the toolbar.
In the builder, click Add ‣ From Database.... Type “silicon” in the search field, and select the silicon standard phase in the list of matches. Information about the lattice, including its symmetries (e.g. that the selected crystal is face centered cubic), can be seen in the lower panel.