Fermi surface effects in solid-solid phase transitions in simple metals under pressure

Original · EN

I discuss the behaviour of Group 1 and 2 elements under pressure, describing crystallography based on diamond anvil pressure cell experiments and electronic structure calculations. In addition to these precise methods, we discuss more intuitive pictures of both the electronic driving force for the transitions, and the structural motifs which optimise the electronic energy by opening pseudogaps at the Fermi energy.