Investigating the Electronic Structure of Zr2CuSb3

Zr2CuSb3 has been shown to crystallize in a tetragonal structure with the P-4m2 space group. It is structurally related to Cu2Sb by replacing three quarters of the Cu atoms with Sb and Zr in a 1-2 ratio. This substitution is known to increase the length of the c-axis as well as the bonding length between the metallic atoms [1]. Previous experiments on Cu2Sb show it possesses a large magnetoresistance (MR) of up to 730% with in-plane current and up to 2700% out of plane.The in-plane MR occurs because of a high mobility of both holes and carriers which are partially compensated while the out of plane MR is due to a quasi-two dimensional, open Fermi surface in kz [2]. However, there has been no experimental work on the nearby compound Zr2CuSb3. Here we synthesize high quality, single crystals of Zr2CuSb3 and study its intrinsic physical properties using electrical transport, angular resolved photoemission spectroscopy (ARPES), and theoretical calculations.