Electric field gradient at Nb site in the intermetallic compounds Nb3X(X=Al, In, Si, Ge, Sn) measured by PAC

Abstract

The electric field gradient (efg) at the Nb site in the intermetallic compounds Nb3X (X = Al, In, Si, Ge, Sn) was measured by the Perturbed Angular Correlation (PAC) method using the well-known gamma-gamma cascade of 133 -482 keV in 181Ta from the β- decay of 181Hf, substituting approximately 0.1 atom percent of Nb. The PAC results show that Vzz drops by nearly 40% when X changes from Al to In, and by about 25% when X changes from Si to Ge and Sn. This behavior is most probably related to the change in the degree of sp hybridization in these compounds. The Vzz values of the studied compounds do not follow the well known universal correlation for the efg's in non-cubic metals but the observed trend is well reproduced by results of ab-initio electronic structure calculations. In the case of Nb3 Al a linear temperature dependence of the quadrupole frequencies was observed in the temperature range of 6.5 to 1210 K.