Why does silicon have an indirect band gap?

It is difficult to intuit how electronic structure features-such as band gap magnitude, location of band extrema, effective masses, -arise from the underlying crystal chemistry of a material. Here we present a strategy to distill sparse and chemically-interpretable tight-binding models from density functional theory calculations, enabling us to interpret how multiple orbital interactions in a 3D crystal conspire to shape the overall band structure. Applying this process to silicon, we show that its indirect gap arises from a competition between first and second nearest-neighbor bonds-where second nearest-neighbor interactions pull the conduction band down from Γ to X in a cosine shape, but the first nearest-neighbor bonds push the band up near X, resulting in the characteristic dip of the silicon conduction band.

Opening the Bandgap of Metallic Half-Heuslers via the Introduction of d-d Orbital Interactions.

Half-Heusler compounds with semiconducting behavior have been developed as high-performance thermoelectric materials for power generation. Many half-Heusler compounds also exhibit metallic behavior without a bandgap and thus inferior thermoelectric performance. Here, taking metallic half-Heusler MgNiSb as an example, a bandgap opening strategy is proposed by introducing the d-d orbital interactions, which enables the opening of the bandgap and the improvement of the thermoelectric performance.