A Procedure for Calculation of the Density of States of Wide-Gap Semiconductors and Dielectrics by Means of the Recursion Method

Abstract

The recursion method allows to calculate the density of states for electrons in solids from a continued fraction. Since only a finite number of coefficients can be computed, the truncation of the continued fraction requires a procedure to approximate the effect of the uncalculated coefficients. Different procedures have been propounded. When they are applied to crystals having a wide gap this often shows up as a minimum of the density of states, which renders the method unappropiate to find the width of a gap and the energy of impurities and defects relative to the band edges. In this paper a procedure based on the method due to Nex [9] to find the integrated density of states is reported that yields better results than the usual ways of concluding the continued fraction.