  Semiconducting transition metal dichalcogenides present a complex electronic
band structure with a rich orbital contribution to their valence and conduction
bands. The possibility to consider the electronic states from a tight-binding
model is highly useful for the calculation of many physical properties, for
which first principle calculations are more demanding in computational terms
when having a large number of atoms. Here, we present a set of Slater-Koster
parameters for a tight-binding model that accurately reproduce the structure
and the orbital character of the valence and conduction bands of single layer
MX$_2$, where M = Mo,Wand X = S, Se. The fit of the analytical tight-binding
Hamiltonian is done based on band structure from ab initio calculations. The
model is used to calculate the optical conductivity of the different compounds
from the Kubo formula.
