English

Precise quantum-geometric electronic properties from first principles

Materials Science 2025-10-29 v2

Abstract

The calculation of quantum-geometric properties of Bloch electrons -- Berry curvature, quantum metric, orbital magnetic moment and effective mass -- was implemented in a pseudopotential plane-wave code. The starting point was the first derivative of the periodic part of the wavefunction psi_k with respect to the wavevector k. This was evaluated with perturbation theory by solving a Sternheimer equation. Comparison of effective masses obtained from perturbation theory for silicon and gallium arsenide with carefully-converged numerical second derivatives of band energies confirms the high precision of the method. Calculations of quantum-geometric quantities for gapped graphene were performed by adding a bespoke symmetry-breaking potential to first-principles graphene. As the two bands near the opened gap are reasonably isolated, the results could be compared with those obtained from an analytical two-band model, allowing to assess the strengths and limitations of such widely-used models. The final application was trigonal tellurium, where quantum-geometric quantities flip sign with chirality.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2506.23652,
  title  = {Precise quantum-geometric electronic properties from first principles},
  author = {José Luís Martins and Carlos Loia Reis and Ivo Souza},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2506.23652},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

30 pages, 10 figures, 3 tables

R2 v1 2026-07-01T03:39:10.923Z