Hi,

> Thank you. This might be a silly question, but what is the meaning of 
> orbitals here? Is it not only 1?

When I say "orbitals" it's really a shorthand for "degrees of freedom".
If you have a lead with 2 sites in the unit cell, and each one has a
single degree of freedom associated with it (i.e. the onsites are just
numbers) then the wavefunction would be a vector with 2 entries.

If you have, say, spin 1/2 particles, then each site would have 2
degrees of freedom associated with it (spin up & spin down). In the
same way, if a site really represents an atom, then your "internal
degrees of freedom" could be the different atomic orbitals (s, p, d etc.).
Of course, Kwant makes no assumptions about what these degrees of
freedom actually mean -- it is up to the user to define what they mean
by describing the appropriate Hamiltonian.


> The orbital elements seem to be conjugate of each other.

I think you are looking at the wrong axis of the `wave_functions`
array. The *first* axis runs over the orbitals, and the *second*
axis runs over the modes.
For a given band, I would expect the left- and right-propagating
modes to be conjugates of each other, as they are related by
time-reversal symmetry (unless you have some terms in your Hamiltonian
that break this, but I think not).

Does that clarify?

Joe

Attachment: signature.asc
Description: PGP signature

Reply via email to