<i>Ab</i> <i>Initio</i> Investigation of Structural and Electronic Properties of ErPb<sub>3</sub> in AB<sub>3</sub> Structure

Abstract

The structural properties and electronic properties of the intermetallic compound ErPb3 which crystallize in AuCu3 type structure (AB3) are studied by means of first principles total energy calculation using full potential linearized plane wave method (FP-LAPW) within the generalized gradient approximation of Perdew, Burke and Ernzrhof (PBE) and local spin density approximation (LSDA) for the exchange correlation functional and including spin magnetic calculation. The total energy is computed as a function of volume and fitted to the Birch-Murnaghan equation of state. The ground state properties of this compound such as equilibrium lattice parameter (a0), bulk modulus (B), and its pressure derivative (B’) are calculated and compared with the available experimental results. We find good agreement with the other theoretical and experimental results. For the compounds, the values of lattice constants obtained by PBE-GGA overestimates and by LSDA underestimates the available experimental values for the same, which verifies the reliability of the present calculation. The value obtained for the bulk modulus is 50.63 GPa. The analysis of electronic properties is achieved by the calculation of the band structures and the density of states in both the spin up and spin down modes, which show a metallic character of ErPB3 due to zero band gap. The values of calculated density of states are found to be 0.36 eV/states and 11.46 eV/states in spin-up and spin-down mode respectively. The calculated magnetic moment (μm) of ErPb3 is 2.06.