Electronic structure and optical properties of solid C60

The electronic structure and the optical properties of face-centered-cubic C60 have been investigated by using an all-electron full-potential method. Our ab initio results show that the imaginary dielectric function for high-energy values looks very similar to that of graphite, revealing close electronic structure similarities between the two systems. We have also identified the origin of different peaks in the dielectric function of fullerene by means of the calculated electronic density of states. The computed optical spectrum compares fairly well with the available experimental data for the Vis–UV absorption spectrum of solid C60.