Screening topological materials with a CsCl-type structure in crystallographic databases

IUCrJ. 2019 Jun 13;6(Pt 4):688-694. doi: 10.1107/S2052252519007383. eCollection 2019 Jul 1.

Abstract

CsCl-type materials have many outstanding characteristics, i.e. simple in structure, ease of synthesis and good stability at room temperature, thus are an excellent choice for designing functional materials. Using high-throughput first-principles calculations, a large number of topological semimetals/metals (TMs) were designed from CsCl-type materials found in crystallographic databases and their crystal and electronic structures have been studied. The CsCl-type TMs in this work show rich topological character, ranging from triple nodal points, type-I nodal lines and critical-type nodal lines, to hybrid nodal lines. The TMs identified show clean topological band structures near the Fermi level, which are suitable for experimental investigations and future applications. This work provides a rich data set of TMs with a CsCl-type structure.

Keywords: CsCl-type materials; crystal structures; density functional theory; electronic structures; first-principles calculations; inorganic materials; topological modeling.

Grants and funding

This work was funded by Bureau of Science and Technology of Hebei Province grant A2017002020. Special Foundation for Theoretical Physics Research Program of China grant 11747152.