Electronic structure of some mercury chalcogenides using Compton spectroscopy

We report the first ever isotropic Compton profiles of mercury chalcogenides using our 740 GBq 137Cs Compton spectrometer. To analyze our measurements, theoretical Compton profiles, energy bands, density of states and Mulliken's populations are computed using pseudopotentials within the Hartree-Fock and density functional theories. A comparison of Compton data on equal-valence-electron-density scale shows the decrease of ionicity from HgS to HgTe. It is seen that these semiconductors have narrow band gap and exhibit inverted-type band structure.