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The Fermi energy is only defined at absolute zero, while the Fermi level is defined for any temperature. The Fermi energy is an energy difference (usually corresponding to a kinetic energy), whereas the Fermi level is a total energy level including kinetic energy and potential energy.
The Fermi level does not necessarily correspond to an actual energy level (in an insulator the Fermi level lies in the band gap), nor does it require the existence of a band structure. Nonetheless, the Fermi level is a precisely defined thermodynamic quantity, and differences in Fermi level can be measured simply with a voltmeter.
Suppose we have a number of energy levels, labeled by index i, each level having energy ε i and containing a total of n i particles. Suppose each level contains g i distinct sublevels, all of which have the same energy, and which are distinguishable. For example, two particles may have different momenta (i.e. their momenta may be along ...
µ is the total chemical potential of electrons, or Fermi level (in semiconductor physics, this quantity is more often denoted E F). The Fermi level of a solid is directly related to the voltage on that solid, as measured with a voltmeter. Conventionally, in band structure plots the Fermi level is taken to be the zero of energy (an arbitrary ...
In solid-state physics, the valence band and conduction band are the bands closest to the Fermi level, and thus determine the electrical conductivity of the solid. In nonmetals, the valence band is the highest range of electron energies in which electrons are normally present at absolute zero temperature, while the conduction band is the lowest range of vacant electronic states.
For a large ensemble the Fermi level will be approximately equal to the chemical potential of the system, and hence every state below this energy must be occupied. Thus, particles fill up all energy levels below the Fermi level at absolute zero, which is equivalent to saying that is the energy level below which there are exactly N ...
The important energy levels in a crystal are the top of the valence band, the bottom of the conduction band, the Fermi level, the vacuum level, and the energy levels of any defect states in the crystal.
In the case of degenerate energy levels, we can write the partition function in terms of the contribution from energy levels (indexed by j) as follows: =, where g j is the degeneracy factor, or number of quantum states s that have the same energy level defined by E j = E s.