Tunable band gap in germanene by surface adsorption

Abstract

Opening a sizable band gap in the zero-gap germanene without heavy loss of carrier mobility is a key issue for its application in nanoelectronic devices such as high-performance field effect transistors (FETs) operating at room temperature. Using the first-principles calculations, we find a band gap is opened at the Dirac point in germanene by single-side adsorption of alkali metal (AM) atoms. This band gap is tunable by varying the coverage and the species of AM atoms, ranging from 0.02 to 0.31 eV, and the maximum global band gap is 0.26 eV. Since the effective masses of electrons and holes in germanene near the Dirac point after surface adsorption (ranging from 0.005 to 0.106 me) are small, the carrier mobility is expected not to degrade much. Therefore germanene is a potential candidate of effective FET channel operating at room temperature upon surface adsorption.

17 pages, 6 figures

References in corpus (2)

• Transport studies of dual-gated ABC and ABA trilayer graphene: band gap opening and band structure tuning in very large perpendicular electric field
• Energy gap opening in submonolayer lithium on graphene: Local density functional and tight-binding calculations

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