Revisiting the electronic structures and phonon properties of thermoelectric antimonide-tellurides: Spin–orbit coupling induced gap opening in ZrSbTe and HfSbTe

Abstract

We report theoretical studies based on density functional theory within spin-orbit coupling to explore electronic structures, lattice dynamical properties of ZrSbTe and HfSbTe. With spin−orbit coupling included, our findings reveal that ZrSbTe and HfSbTe exhibit a semiconducting behavior with narrow indirect band gaps of 0.10 eV, and 0.15 eV, respectively. Besides, the lattice dynamical properties revealed that the explored materials based on antimonide−tellurides are dynamically stable. On the basis of electronic structures, the thermoelectric properties were computed using the Landauer-Buttiker formula by considering both electron and phonon contributions in the transport properties calculation. We employed Green’s-function method based on the Green-Kubo-Mori formula, where the thermoelectric properties such as the electrical conductivity σ and thermopower α were estimated in terms of the correlation functions. The present work could be viewed as a significant amendment of the electronic nature of ZrSbTe and HfSbTe that were reported to be metallic in literature.