Quasi free-standing silicene in a superlattice with hexagonal boron nitride

Abstract

We study a superlattice of silicene and hexagonal boron nitride by first principles calculations and demonstrate that the interaction between the layers of the superlattice is very small. As a consequence, quasi free-standing silicene is realized in this superlattice. In particular, the Dirac cone of silicene is preserved, which has not been possible in any other system so far. Due to the wide band gap of hexagonal boron nitride, the superlattice realizes the characteristic physical phenomena of free-standing silicene. In particular, we address by model calculations the combined effect of the intrinsic spin-orbit coupling and an external electric field, which induces a transition from a metal to a topological insulator and further to a band insulator.

9 pages and 3 figures

References in corpus (5)

• Electric Field Effect in Atomically Thin Carbon Films
• Quantum ESPRESSO: a modular and open-source software project for quantum simulations of materials
• Boron nitride substrates for high-quality graphene electronics
• Emergence of Superlattice Dirac Points in Graphene on Hexagonal Boron Nitride
• Electronic structure of silicon-based nanostructures

Cited by in corpus (25)

• Monolayer Topological Insulators: Silicene, Germanene and Stanene
• Tuning the Structural, Electronic, and Magnetic Properties of Germanene by the Adsorption of 3$d$ Transition Metal Atoms
• Large Enhancement and Tunable Band Gap in Silicene by Small Organic Molecule Adsorption
• Highly Sensitive Gas Sensors Based on Silicene Nanoribbons
• Current developments in silicene and germanene
• Electronic and optical properties of bilayer blue phosphorus
• van der Waals Heterostructures of Germanene, Stanene and Silicene with Hexagonal Boron Nitride and Their Topological Domain Walls
• Electrically Engineered Band Gap in Two-Dimensional Ge, Sn, and Pb: A First-Principles and Tight-Binding Approach
• The Structural and Electronic Properties of Pristine and Doped Polythiophene: Periodic Versus Molecular Calculations
• Plasmon properties and hybridization effects in Silicene
• On the Optical Properties of Excitons in Buckled 2D Materials in an External Electric Field
• Itinerant Ferromagnetism and $p+i{p}^{\prime }$ Superconductivity in Doped Bilayer Silicene
• Solid argon as a possible substrate for quasi-freestanding silicene
• Can freestanding Xene monolayers behave as excitonic insulators?
• Ab initio Investigation on Hybrid Graphite-like Structure Made up of Silicene and Boron Nitride
• Electronic properties of silicene in BN/silicene van der Waals heterostructures
• Theoretical study of quantum emitters in two-dimensional silicon carbide monolayer
• Topological phase in oxidized zigzag stanene nanoribbons
• Resonance Raman spectroscopy of silicene and germanene
• Interband and intraband transition, dynamical polarization and screening of the monolayer and bilayer silicene in low-energy tight-binding model
• Protected edge states in silicene antidots and dots in magnetic field
• Spin Transport in Armchair Silicene Nanoribbon on the Substrate: The Role of Charged Impurity
• Tailoring topological states in silicene using different halogen-passivated Si(111) substrates
• Transition between half-metal and ferromagnetic semiconductor induced by silicon vacancy in epitaxial silicene
• Substrate-induced magnetism and topological phase transition in silicene