Optical Properties of Solids IX

Dr. Stefan Zollner will give a series of public lectures on Optical Properties of Solids for the Institute of Physics. The lectures are recorded and placed online including other materials.

Part IX covers the following topics: Interband transitions, van Hove singularities, critical-point lineshapes.

The lectures follow the textbook by Mark Fox “Optical Properties of Solids”, with additional materials by the instructor to make the lectures more self-contained, especially for scientists from other disciplines. They will cover the basic theory for transmission and reflection of light based on Maxwell’s equations and the optical properties of metals and insulators using the Drude and Lorentz oscillator models for electrons and phonons, which form the basis of ellipsometry data analysis. They will then move on to describe infrared lattice absorption, interband absorption in semiconductors, the excitonic enhancement of these transitions due to electron-hole interaction, photoluminescence, and finite-size quantum effects leading to a blueshift of the optical spectra in confined systems. Mathematical formalisms will be kept to a minimum. Instead, the focus is on concepts, graphs and figures, and the interpretation of optical spectra.

This work was supported by ESIF and MEYS (Project IOP researches mobility - CZ.02.2.69/0.0/0.0/16_027/0008215).