Institute for Advanced Simulation An Introduction to the Tight Binding Approximation – Implementation by Diagonalisation Anthony T. Paxton published in Multiscale Simulation Methods in Molecular Sciences, J. Grotendorst, N. Attig, S. Bl¨ugel, D. Marx (Eds.), Institute for Advanced Simulation, Forschungszentrum J¨ulich, NIC Series, Vol. 42, ISBN 978-3-9810843-8-2, pp. 145-176, 2009. c 2009 by John von Neumann Institute for Computing Permission to make digital or hard copies of portions of this work for personal or classroom use is granted provided that the copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise requires prior specific permission by the publisher mentioned above. http://www.fz-juelich.de/nic-series/volume42 An Introduction to the Tight Binding Approximation – Implementation by Diagonalisation Anthony T. Paxton Atomistic Simulation Centre School of Mathematics and Physics Queen’s University Belfast Belfast BT1 7NN, UK E-mail:
[email protected] 1 What is Tight Binding? “Tight binding” has existed for many years as a convenient and transparent model for the description of electronic structure in molecules and solids. It often provides the basis for construction of many body theories such as the Hubbard model and the Anderson impurity model. Slater and Koster call it the tight binding or “Bloch” method and their historic paper provides the systematic procedure for formulating a tight binding model.1 In their paper you will find the famous “Slater–Koster” table that is used to build a tight binding hamiltonian.