Pressure-Induced Metallization and Electrical Phase Diagram for Polycrystalline CaB6 under High Pressure and Low Temperature

The electrical properties of polycrystaltine CaB6 are revealed by in-situ resistance measurements under high pressure and low temperature. Due to the existence of grain boundaries, polycrystalline CaB6 behaves with semiconducting transport properties, which is different from the semimetallic CaB6 single crystals. The temperaturedependent resistance measurement results show that before the structural phase transition at 12.3 GPa the high pressure first induces the metallization at 6.5 GPa for CAB6. Moreover, the phase diagram for CaB6 is drawn based on the investigated electric conducting properties and at least three different conducting phases are found even at moderate high pressure and low temperature, indicating that the electric nature of CaB6 is very sensitive to the environment.