Electronic structure of the semimetals bismuth and antimony

Abstract

We have developed a third-neighbor tight-binding model, with spin-orbit coupling included, to treat the electronic properties of Bi and Sb. This model successfully reproduces the features near the Fermi surface that will be most important in semimetal-semiconductor device structures, including (a) the small overlap of valence and conduction bands, (b) the electron and hole effective masses, and (c) the shapes of the electron and hole Fermi surfaces. The present tight-binding model is the first to treat these semimetallic properties quantitatively, and it should therefore be useful for calculations of the electronic properties of proposed semimetal-semiconductor systems, including superlattices and resonant tunneling devices.