Insights on the origin of the structural phase transition in BaV10O15 from electronic structure calculations and the effect of Ti-doping on its structure and electrical transport properties

Band structure calculations at the level of LMTO-ASA provide insight into the electronic structure of BaV10O15 and the origin of the structural phase transition. A crystal orbital Hamiltonian population/integrated crystal orbital Hamiltonian population analysis provides evidence that the crystallographic phase transition is driven by V–V bond formation. As well, the energy bands near the Fermi level are very narrow, <1eV, consistent with the fact that the observed insulating behavior can be due to electron localization via either Mott-Hubbard correlation and/or Anderson disorder. The partial solid solution, BaV10−xTixO15, was examined to study the effect of Ti-doping at the V sites on the structure and electronic transport properties. In spite of the non-existence of “BaTi10O15”, the limiting x=8, as indicated by a monotonic increase in the cell volume and systematic changes in properties. This limit may be due to the difficulty of stabilizing Ti2+ in this structure. For x=0.5 both the first order structural phase transition and the magnetic transition at 40K are quenched. The samples obey the Curie–Weiss law to x=3 with nearly spin only effective moments along with θ values which range from −1090K (x=0.5) to −1629K (x=3). For x>3 a very large, …