Thermal response to electronic structures of bulk semiconductors

In this work thermal dependent calculations of the electronic energy band structures based on local pseudopotential method were performed. Monotonic decreasing functions are obtained for the temperature dependent form factors. Good results of the fundamental energy gaps for Si, Ge, GaAs, and AlAs semiconductors of this work with the experimental data were obtained, especially at absolute zero temperature. We found, interestingly that most values of the electronic energy bands for all semiconductors were more sensitive to the temperature dependent form factor associated with the reciprocal lattice vectors of Delta(G) over right arrow vertical bar(2) = 11 than any other value. (C) 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.