electrons in glass - nobel prize.pdfVIP

ELECTRONS IN GLASS Nobel Lecture, 8 December, 1977 by N E V I L L M O T T Cavendish Laboratory, Cambridge, England The manufacture of glass, along with the forming of metals, is an art that goes back to prehistoric times. It always seems to me remarkable that our first understanding of the ductility of metals in terms of atomic movements came after the discovery of the neutron. Geoffrey Taylor (1) was the great name here, and Nabarro (2) and I first tried to explain why metallic alloys are hard. The years that passed before anyone tried to get a theoretical understanding of electrons in glass surprises me even more. After all, the striking fact about glass is that it is transparent, and that one does not have to use particularly pure materials to make it so. But, in terms of modern solid state physics, what does “transparent” mean? It means that, in the energy spectrum of the electrons in the material, there is a gap of forbidden energies between the occupied states (the valence band) and the empty states (the conduction band); light quanta corresponding to a visible wave-length do not have the energy needed to make electrons jump across it. This gap is quite a sophisti- cated concept, entirely dependent on quantum mechanics, and introduced for solids in the 1930’s by the pioneering work of Bloch, Peierls and A. H. Wilson. The theory was based on the assumption that the