INCLUSION OF SPIN-ORBIT-COUPLING INTO TIGHT-BINDING BAND-STRUCTURE CALCULATIONS FOR BULK AND SUPERLATTICE SEMICONDUCTORS

Recent interest in superlattice based semiconductor devices has led to the need for the ability to make accurate superlattice bandstructure calculations. The tight binding model formalism has already been applied to this problem. In this paper, a technique is presented for the inclusion of spin-orbit coupling into the tight binding formalism. The most attractive feature of the technique presented is that it does not increase the size of the basis which may already be very large for superlattices. This allows a more accurate calculation of the superlattice band structure at no additional cost.