Sr2SmNbO6 perovskite: Synthesis, characterization and density functional theory calculations

•Electronic structure and dynamical properties of Sr2SmNbO6 (SSN) have been studied.•Raman spectroscopy is applied to analyze the crystal structure and the vibrational properties of SSN.•The inter-band transitions to the energy loss spectrum have been analyzed from the electronic band structure.•Chemical shift of the core level XPS spectrum suggests covalent bonding between O and Sm/Nb.

The density functional theory (DFT) under the generalized gradient approximation (GGA) has been used to investigate the electronic structure of double perovskite oxide Sr2SmNbO6 synthesized by the solid-state reaction technique. The Rietveld refinement of the X-ray diffraction pattern of the sample shows the monoclinic P21/n phase at room temperature. The X-ray photoemission spectrum (XPS) of the material is collected in the energy window of 0–1200 eV. The chemical shift of the constituent elements calculated from the core level XPS spectra is used to analyze the covalency between the O anion and Sm/Nb cations. The valence band (VB) XPS spectrum is compared with the calculated VB spectrum using partial density of states in a standard way. The Raman spectrum is employed to investigate the phonon modes of the material in the monoclinic phase. Lorentzian lines are used to fit the experimental Raman spectrum, which present 24 phonon modes corresponding to the stretching and banding of NbO6/SmO6 octahedra and translational motion of Sr along the SrO bond. The discrepancy between the measured and calculated band gap values has been removed by applying modified Becke-Johnson (mBJ) potential in the DFT calculations. The experimental optical band gap obtained from the UV–visible reflectance spectrum is found to be 3.42 eV, which is well matched with the DFT calculated value of 3.2 eV, and suggests the semiconducting nature of the material. The real (ε′) and imaginary (ε″) parts of the optical dielectric constant as a function of energy along the x-, y- and z-polarization directions using mBJ potential are calculated. The collective vibrational modes of the atoms, the Born effective charge of the ions and their effect on the static dielectric constant of the material are studied using DFT. The calculated value of static dielectric constant for SSN is found to be 41.3.