Monday, May 01, 2017

Not The Twilight Zone, but The Brillouin Zone

It occurs to me that one should initially introduce the idea of a Brillouin zone to students as if it were narrated by Rod Serling in the style of The Twilight Zone. It might go something like this:

There is a primitive cell in reciprocal space beyond that which is known to undergraduates. It is a fundamental unit into which that space is divided. It can tile lattices as vast as space and as timeless as infinity. It leads to a sequence of disjoint equal-volume regions at increasing distances from the origin, and it lies between the pit of physicists' fears and the summit of their knowledge. This is the region of imagination. It is an area which we call THE BRILLOUIN ZONE.

Update: Joshua Bodyfelt produced a really nice picture after seeing my quote above on Facebook. Here it is.

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