Spontaneous Symmetry Breaking and Dynamic Phase Transition in Monolayer Silicene

Abstract

The (r3xr3)R30° honeycomb of silicene monolayer on Ag(111) was found to undergo a phase transition to two types of mirror-symmetric boundary-separated rhombic phases at temperatures below 40 K by scanning tunneling microscopy. The first-principles calculations reveal that weak interactions between silicene and Ag(111) drive the spontaneous ultra buckling in the monolayer silicene, forming two energy-degenerate and mirror-symmetric (r3xr3)R30° rhombic phases, in which the linear band dispersion near Dirac point (DP) and a significant gap opening (150 meV) at DP were induced. The low transition barrier between these two phases enables them interchangeable through dynamic flip-flop motion, resulting in the (r3xr3)R30° honeycomb structure observed at high temperature.

12 pages, 4 figures

References in corpus (3)

• Boron nitride substrates for high-quality graphene electronics
• Valley-Polarized Metals and Quantum Anomalous Hall Effect in Silicene
• Electronic structure of silicon-based nanostructures

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