Page "Condensed matter physics" Paragraph 21

The metallic state has historically been an important building block for studying properties of solids.

The first theoretical description of metals was given by Paul Drude in 1900 with the Drude model, which explained electrical and thermal properties by describing a metal as an ideal gas of then-newly discovered electrons.

This classical model was then improved by Arnold Sommerfeld who incorporated the Fermi-Dirac statistics of electrons and was able to explain the anomalous behavior of the specific heat of metals in the Wiedemann – Franz law.

In 1913, X-ray diffraction experiments revealed that metals possess periodic lattice structure.

Swiss physicist Felix Bloch provided a wave function solution to the Schrödinger equation with a periodic potential, called the Bloch wave.