Pressure-induced variation of structural, elastic, vibrational, electronic, thermodynamic properties and hardness of Ruthenium Carbides

Three of the five structures obtained from the evolutionary algorithm based structure search of Ruthenium Carbide systems in the stoichiometries RuC, Ru2C and Ru3C are relaxed at different pressures in the range 0-200 GPa and the pressure-induced variation of their structural, elastic, dynamical, electronic and thermodynamic properties as well as hardness is investigated in detail. No structural transition is present for these systems in this pressure range. RuC-Zinc blende is mechanically and dynamically unstable close to 100 GPa. RuC-Rhombohedral and Ru3C-Hexagonal retain mechanical and dynamical stability up to 200 GPa. For all three systems the electronic bands and density of states spread out with pressure and the band gap increases with pressure for the semiconducting RuC-Zinc blende. From the computed IR spectrum of RuC-Zinc blende at 50 GPa it is noted that the IR frequency increases with pressure. Using a semi-empirical model for hardness it is estimated that hardness of all three systems consistently increases with pressure. The hardness of RuC-Zinc blende increases towards the superhard regime up to the limiting pressure of its mechanical stability while that of RuC-Rhombohedral becomes 30 GPa at the pressure of 150 GPa.