The ansatz is the special case of electron waves in a periodic crystal lattice using Bloch's theorem as treated generally in the dynamical theory of diffraction. Every crystal is a periodic structure which can be characterized by a Bravais lattice, and for each Bravais lattice we can determine the reciprocal lattice, which encapsulates the periodicity in a set of three reciprocal lattice vectors . Now, any periodic potential  which shares the same periodicity as the direct lattice can be expanded out as a Fourier series whose only non-vanishing components are those associated with the reciprocal lattice vectors. So the expansion can be written as:
where  for any set of integers .
From this theory, an attempt can be made to predict the band structure of a particular material, however most ab initio methods for electronic structure calculations fail to predict the observed band gap.