This project was undertaken for a numerical analysis course. The project uses the tight binding model with the hamiltonian parameters supplied by Chadi and Cohen (D. J. Chadi and Marvin L. Cohen. Tight-binding calculations of the valence bands of diamond and zincblende crystals. phys. stat. sol., 68:405, 1975.). It calculates the eigenvalues for a 2D plane in the first Brillouin zone, and saves those eigen values to a 3D model file, where x and y are mapped to the position on the plane, and z is the eigenvalue in eV. This is then imported into Blender, skinned, scaled, and printed on a ZCorp 310 printer. As a future project, even more interesting shapes could be obtained by incorporating external fields into the calculation.
Poster presented at the undergraduate research symposium: