English

Surface polarization and edge charges

Materials Science 2015-08-18 v1

Abstract

The term "surface polarization" is introduced to describe the in-plane polarization existing at the surface of an insulating crystal when the in-plane surface inversion symmetry is broken. Here, the surface polarization is formulated in terms of a Berry phase, with the hybrid Wannier representation providing a natural basis for study of this effect. Tight binding models are used to demonstrate how the surface polarization reveals itself via the accumulation of charges at the corners/edges for a two dimensional rectangular lattice and for GaAs.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1505.00072,
  title  = {Surface polarization and edge charges},
  author = {Yuanjun Zhou and Karin Rabe and David Vanderbilt},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1505.00072},
  year   = {2015}
}

Comments

5 pages, 4 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-22T09:26:24.100Z