Structural property of platinum mononitride

The structural stability and pressure-induced structural phase transition of platinum mononitride (PtN), as well as its electronic structure, were studied using the full potential augmented plane wave plus local orbitals method with the generalized gradient approximation (GGA) exchange-correlation functional. The total energy calculations show that the optimized wurtzite structure is most stable energetically among four structures: zinc blende, rocksalt, CsCl and wurtzite, which reveals the platinum mononitride PtN perhaps crystallizes in the wurtzite structure; the pressure of phase transition from wurtzite to rocksalt is predicted to be 41.4 GPa.The calculated bulk modulus of the wurtzite structure is 99.41 GPa, which is smaller than that of the other three structures and face-centered cubic Pt. The band structure calculations show wurtzite PtN is metallic.