Relativistic LMTO method for systems of light elements

This paper reviews the theoretical background of an approximate treatment of relativistic effects within the tight-binding (TB) linear muffin-tin orbital (LMTO) method for ab-initio electronic structure calculations of solids. The formalism employs two-component spinors and an orbital basis set of the scalar-relativistic approximation. The developed theory is applied to selected metallic systems and its results are compared to those of a fully relativistic TB-LMTO method.