Possibility Of Semiconducting Electronic Structure On Al-Pd-Co 1/1 Cubic Quasicrystalline Approximant

Search for high-order semiconducting quasicrystalline approximants can play an essential role in finding clues to the discovery of semiconducting quasicrystals. According to the previous theoretical work, a model of Al Pd-Co 1/1 cubic quasicrystalline approximant was predicted to be semiconductor from a calculation based on the density functional theory. We noticed that the F phase in the Al-Pd-Co system is a 2 x 2 x 2 superlattice structure of the calculated model. To verify this prediction, we synthesized the F phase sample, and measured its thermoelectric properties. The measured electrical conductivity linearly increases with increasing temperature. The magnitude of measured Seebeck coefficient is smaller than the typical semiconductor. These properties indicate that the prepared sample of the F phase has a pseudogap rather than a finite band gap. To investigate this discrepancy between the theoretical prediction and experimental results, we calculated the electronic structure for the three structural models using density functional theory. The most energetically stable model has a semimetallic electronic structure.