Recent content by stone

No, the only symmetry that is required is Time reversal (I presume that by topological insulators you mean the Z2 variety). There are material realizations for both inversion symmetric and asymmetric crystals.

As far as I remember, Feynman has a very nice discussion, in terms of dipoles, in Vol. 1 of his lectures. He also discusses refraction, interference and diffraction.

To add to previous posts, at relevant energies (high), it is the four-momentum which must be taken into account (E, px, py, pz). Further the momentum addition laws are also changed to their lorentz form.

Unfortunately that's a problem and I don't know a way out. Maybe you could email Norbury and request him to send a pdf with diagrams.

There is an excellent set of lecture notes by Prof. John Norbury on both quantum mechanics and quantum field theory. These are freely available online. Just google norbury+physics. In the quantum mechanics lecture notes he essentially follows Griffiths' book but there are a lot of problems and...

Could you please suggest some good books. I tried Mahan but it was a bit too difficult for me. Is there something at a more beginner's level?

inkscape looks really good too!

I have started looking at coreldraw and illustrator. By the way, some of the 'pseudo' 3d drawing can also be done with gimp, which is free.

thanks a lot! that was exactly what I was looking for

any more help would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks for the reply. I have used it to plot data in both 2D and 3D. But can we draw schematic 3D figures using it, like in the reference quoted in my previous post?

What are the softwares that people usually use to create high quality schematic figures (both in 2D and 3D) suitable for publication? For example Fig 1) in http://arxiv.org/abs/1105.1787

thanks for yielding! I understand now.

Some more help would be appreciated.

Thanks for the reply. Yes the number of particles is still one, but the basis is now 4x4 instead of the usual 2x2, then we need to represent the symmetry operators in terms of 4x4 matrices. I am still not sure how to go about doing this.