The Drude-Smith Equation and Related Equations for the Frequency-Dependent Electrical Conductivity of Materials: Insight from a Memory Function Formalism

Abstract

The Drude-Smith equation is widely used for treating the frequency-dependent electrical conductivity of materials in the terahertz region. An attractive feature is its sparsity of adjustable parameters. A significant improvement over Drude theory for these materials, the theory includes backscattering of the charge carriers. It has nevertheless been criticized, including by Smith himself, because of the arbitrariness of a step in the derivation. We recall a somewhat similar behavior of back scattering in fluids observed in molecular dynamics computations and discussed in terms of memory functions. We show how theories such as Drude-Smith and Cocker et al. are examples of a broader class of theories by showing how they also arise as particular cases of a memory function formalism that divides the interactions into short and long range.