Materials modeling for photonic applications

Application of sophisticated methods to model complex systems is recently gaining even more importance since they allow designing material with properties tailored to specific applications. Problems are however arising from the wide variety of different elements which may enter at play in a chemical reaction. These problems are particularly heavy when one tries to describe complex systems where the application of traditional methods based on the Schroedinger equation or on the density functional theory, becomes inappropriate. In these cases it is worth to use semi-empirical methods. In this work, we will show how the electronegativity equalization method may be used to describe disordered network used in photonics. X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy will be used to verify the reliability of the model.