Elastic wave speeds, Debye temperature and microhardness of YX3 (X = In, Sn, Tl and Pb) intermetallic compounds

Abstract

In the present work, we reviewed and report on the theoretical prediction of the longitudinal, transverse and average elastic wave veloci-ties, and the Debye temperature for some nonmagnetic YX3 (X = In, Sn, Tl, and Pb) intermetallic compounds with stable cubic AuCu3-type structure. The lattice parameters and the elastic constants used here are taken from the work of Abraham et al [1] using the general-ized gradient approximation (PBE-GGA). Our results are analyzed and compared with the available theoretical and experimental data, and in general a good agreement is found. The deviation between our value (224.4 K) of the Debye temperature θD for YSn3 material and the experimental one (210 K) is around 6.62%, while the deviation between our result (1401 m/s) of the transverse elastic wave velocity for YTl3 intermetallic material and the calculated one (1470 m/s) is about 4.93%. In addition the Young’s Modulus and Poisson’s Ratio of YX3 intermetallic compounds for the crystallographic planes (100), (110) and (111) are predicted.