A bond-orbital interpretation of the linear dielectric and magnetic properties of the ternary chalcopyrites

The bond-orbital theory developed for the elemental and binary tetrahedral semiconductors has been extended for application to the ternary chalcopyrite structure. Using only bond-orbital parameters defined and determined earlier for the corresponding binary systems we show that the theory is able to reproduce the known experimental data for the long-wavelength electronic contribution to refractive index of the ternary systems with a rms accuracy of the order of 3%. We also report the experimental measurement of room-temperature diamagnetic susceptibility for several chalcopyrites and use these data to test the bond-orbital theory in the magnetic context. Again, we find that the theory is able to reproduce the experimental data (this time with a rms accuracy of about 4%) using only parameters defined for the corresponding binary systems. Finally, we give the bond-orbital estimates for refractive index and diamagnetic susceptibility for the complete series of I-III-VI2 and II-IV-V2 ternary chalcopyrites.