  The most popular electronic structure method, the linear muffin-tin orbital
method (LMTO), in its full-potential (FP) and relativistic forms has been
extended to calculate the spectroscopic properties of materials form first
principles, i.e, optical spectra, x-ray magnetic circular dichroism (XMCD) and
magneto-optical kerr effect (MOKE). The paper describes an overview of the
FP-LMTO basis set and the calculation of the momentum matrix elements. Some
applications concerning the computation of optical properties of semiconductors
and XMCD spectra of transition metal alloys are reviewed.
