Fermi Level
According to the Pauli principle, the electrons in the ground state occupy all the lowest-energy states, up to some Fermi energy . Since the energy is given by
- ,
this corresponds to occupying all the states with wave vectors, where is so-called Fermi wave vector, given by
- ,
where is the total number of electrons in the system, and V is the total volume. The Fermi energy is then
In a nearly-free-electron model of a -valent metal, one can replace with, where is the total number of metal ions.
Read more about this topic: Free Electron Model
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