Quasiparticle band structures and optical properties of magnesium fluoride

The quasiparticle and optical properties of magnesium fluoride (MgF(2)) are computed within the GW approximation based on many-body perturbation theory (MBPT). The many-body effects appearing in self-energy and electron-hole interactions have an important influence on the electronic and optical properties. The DFT-LDA calculation shows a 6.78 eV band gap. Two methods are employed to evaluate the self-energy within the GW approximation in the present work. The generalized plasmon pole model (GPP) provides a band gap of 12.17 eV, which agrees well with the experimental value of 12.4 eV (Thomas et al 1973 Phys. Status Solidi b 56 163). Another band gap value of 11.30 eV is obtained by using a full frequency-dependent self-energy, which is also not far from the experimental value and is much better than the result from the LDA calculation. The calculated optical spectrum within DFT is significantly different from the experiment. Although the calculated optical absorption threshold within the GW method is close to the experiment, the overall shape of the spectrum is still similar to the case of DFT. However, the overall shape of the spectrum via the Bethe-Salpeter equation (BSE) method agrees well with the experiment.