The Dodecagonal Quasicrystalline Telluride (Ta, V)1.6Te And Its Crystalline Approximant (TaV)97Te60

Abstract

AbstractThe dodecagonal (dd) quasicrystalline tantalum telluride dd Ta1.6Te and the crystalline approximant Ta97Te60have been modified by partly replacing tantalum by vanadium. The impact of the substitution on the structures has been studied by X-ray and electron diffraction and by high-resolution transmission electron microscopy. The layered-type approximant structure of Ta83V14Te60was determined by single crystal X-ray means. The partitioning of vanadium on 21 out of 29 crystallographically inequivalent metal sites is referred to, but not controlled by the Dirichlet domain volume available at the sites. A HRTEM projection of dd (Ta, V)1.6Te onto the dodecagonal plane is analysed with respect to the arrangement of (Ta, V)151Te74clusters on the vertices of an irregular aperiodic square-triangle tiling, the edge length of which corresponds to the distance between the centres of two such clusters. The clusters comprise about 1 nm thick corrugated lamellae which are periodically stacked by weak Te-Te interactions.