Strong influence of off-site symmetry positions of hydrogen atoms in ScH3 hcp phases

We investigate the wave-like arrangements of H atoms around metal plane (Hm) in the ScH3 hcp phase by using the ab-initio method. We found that only P63/mmc, P3¯c1, P63cm and P63 phases are energetically favorable. The wave-like arrangement allows the off-site symmetry positions of the H atoms, and leads to substantial changes in the pair distribution between Sc and H atoms which are associating with the changes in the electronic structure in such a way that the total energy is lowering. The symmetry breaking from P63mmc is also responsible for the band gap opening. In the P63 structure, the calculated band gap is 0.823 eV and 1.223 eV using GGA and sX-LDA functionals, respectively. This band gap can be compared with 1.7 eV derived from the optical measurement and 1.55 eV from the HSE06 calculation. Thus, the broken symmetry structures can be viewed as Peierls distortion of the P63/mmc structure. Furthermore, we found that only the P63 structure is dynamically stable, unlike YH3 where the P63cm structure is also stable. The stability of P63 comes from sufficiently strong interactions between two neighboring H atoms at their off-site symmetry positions, i.e. near the metal plane and near the tetragonal site. The P63 phonon density of states is in good agreement with the data from the neutron experiment.