First-principles study of structural, elastic, electronic and thermodynamic properties of topological insulator Bi2Se3 under pressure

Abstract

The structural, elastic, electronic and thermodynamic properties of the rhombohedral topological insulator Bi2Se3 are investigated by the generalized gradient approximation (GGA) with the Wu–Cohen (WC) exchange-correlation functional. The calculated lattice constants agree well with the available experimental and other theoretical data. Our GGA calculations indicate that Bi2Se3 is a 3D topological insulator with a band gap of 0.287 eV, which are well consistent with the experimental value of 0.3 eV. The pressure dependence of the elastic constants Cij, bulk modulus B, shear modulus G, Young’s modulus E, and Poisson’s ratio σ of Bi2Se3 are also obtained successfully. The bulk modulus obtained from elastic constants is 53.5 GPa, which agrees well with the experimental value of 53 GPa. We also investigate the shear sound velocity VS, longitudinal sound velocity VL, and Debye temperature ΘE from our elastic constants, as well as the thermodynamic properties from quasi-harmonic Debye model. We obtain that the heat capacity Cv and the thermal expansion coefficient α at 0 GPa and 300 K are 120.78 J mol−1 K−1 and 4.70 × 10−5 K−1, respectively.