CONFINEMENT AND THE CLOPW METHOD

Plane waves and Confined Localized Orbitals have been used to construc t a new mixed basis for electronic structure calculations. Confinement is a mathematical transformation which smoothly suppresses the tails of the atomic orbitals. This eliminates multicentre integrals in the e xpressions for the matrix elements. Using self-consistent potentials s upplied by the linear muffin tin orbital method (LMTO) we have calcula ted the bulk band structures of Al, Si, Cu, and LiH to a degree of acc uracy comparable with the results given by the LMTO calculations. The basis functions are energy independent so the full solution is obtaine d without invoking any kind of linearization scheme.