Electronic Structure of Crystalline Buckyballs: fcc-C60

Abstract

The electronic properties of pristine fcc-C60 are calculated by utilizing a variety of density functional theory (DFT) approaches including the Perdew-Burke-Ernzerhof generalized gradient approximation (PBE-GGA), PBE-GGA+DFT-D3(vdW), Engel and Vosko GGA (EV-GGA), GGA plus Hubbard U parameter (GGA+U), hybrids Becke–Perdew–Wang hybrid functional (B3PW91), Becke–Lee–Yang–Parr hybrid functional (B3LYP), the PBE exchange-correlation functional (PBE0), and Tran and Blaha regular and non-regular modified Becke and Johnson (TB-mBJ) potential within a DFT frame work using augmented plane waves plus local orbital method. The comparison of the calculated results with the experimental values shows that the non-regular TB-mBJ method reproduces a correct experimental direct band gap of 2.12 eV at X symmetry for this compound. The effectiveness of this theoretical approach in the reproduction of the experimental band gap is due to the proper treatment of the electrons in the interstitial region of the crystal. Our results show that the C60 clusters are weakly interacting with each other in the fcc crystal. This study also reveals that the five-fold degeneracies of the isolated C60 molecule due to its icosahedral symmetry are completely lifted at an X symmetry point by the crystal field.