Pressure response to electronic structures of bulk semiconductors at room temperature

We studied the effect of hydrostatic pressure (at room temperature) on the electronic band structures for Si, GaAs, and AlAs bulk semiconductors. Our calculations were based on the local empirical pseudopotential formalism. Also, the dependence of the energy gaps for Si, GaAs and AlAs semiconductors on the hydrostatic pressure were calculated. We found that the most values of the electronic energy bands were more sensitive to the pressure dependent form factor associated with the reciprocal lattice vectors of vertical bar Delta(G) over right arrow vertical bar(2) = 11 than any other value. Our results for band gaps are found to be in good agreement with the available experimental data. (C) 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.