The Drude-Smith Equation and Related Equations for the Frequency-Dependent Electrical Conductivity of Materials: Insight from a Memory Function Formalism
- Creators
- Chen, Wei-Chen
-
Marcus, Rudolph A.
Abstract
The Drude-Smith equation is widely used for treating the frequency-dependent electrical conductivity of materials in the terahertz region. An attractive feature is its sparsity of adjustable parameters. A significant improvement over Drude theory for these materials, the theory includes backscattering of the charge carriers. It has nevertheless been criticized, including by Smith himself, because of the arbitrariness of a step in the derivation. We recall a somewhat similar behavior of back scattering in fluids observed in molecular dynamics computations and discussed in terms of memory functions. We show how theories such as Drude-Smith and Cocker et al. are examples of a broader class of theories by showing how they also arise as particular cases of a memory function formalism that divides the interactions into short and long range.
Additional Information
© 2021 The Authors. ChemPhysChem published by Wiley-VCH GmbH. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Issue Online: 18 August 2021; Version of Record online: 03 July 2021; Accepted manuscript online: 18 June 2021; Manuscript revised: 10 June 2021; Manuscript received: 18 April 2021. This work is dedicated to a dear friend, Jean-Michel Savéant, whose company and joyfulness I shall sorely miss. The authors are pleased to acknowledge the support of this research by the Office of Naval Research and the Army Research Office, and the helpful comments of Professors Sundstrom, Nemec and Ponseca. Author Contributions: W.-C.C. Conceptualization: Equal; Data curation: Lead; Formal analysis: Equal; Investigation: Lead; Methodology: Equal; Software: Lead; Writing – original draft: Equal; Writing – review & editing: Equal. The authors declare no conflict of interest.Attached Files
Published - cphc.202100299.pdf
Published - cphc.202100567.pdf
Supplemental Material - cphc202100299-sup-0001-misc_information.pdf
Cover Image - cphc.202100568.pdf
Files
Additional details
- PMCID
- PMC8456847
- Eprint ID
- 109627
- Resolver ID
- CaltechAUTHORS:20210628-191053480
- Office of Naval Research (ONR)
- Army Research Office (ARO)
- Created
-
2021-06-29Created from EPrint's datestamp field
- Updated
-
2021-09-28Created from EPrint's last_modified field