Topic summary
Non-metals
Extracted from the Wikipedia article Nonmetallic material.
General definition
The original approach to conduction and nonmetals was a band-structure with delocalized electrons (i.e. spread out in space). In this approach a nonmetal has a gap in the energy levels of the electrons at the Fermi level. In contrast, a metal would have at least one partially occupied band at the Fermi level; in a semiconductor or insulator there are no delocalized states at the Fermi level, see for instance Ashcroft and Mermin. These definitions are equivalent to stating that metals conduct electricity at absolute zero, as suggested by Nevill Francis Mott, and the equivalent definition at other temperatures is also commonly used as in textbooks such as Chemistry of the Non-Metals by Ralf Steudel and work on metal–insulator transitions.