Quantum Effects on the Dielectric Function of Porous Silicon

In this work, the imaginary part of the dielectric function of porous silicon is studied by means of both the tight-binding and the effective medium approaches, in the latter exact result is obtained for the case of 50% porosity. Within the tight-binding approximation, the dielectric function is calculated by using the interconnected and chessboard-like supercell models for the Si skeleton. These microscopic models give quantitatively similar results, which are by a factor of three larger than those from the effective medium theory.