Kagome silicene: a novel exotic form of two-dimensional epitaxial silicon

Abstract

Since the discovery of graphene, intensive efforts have been made in search of novel two-dimensional (2D) materials. Decreasing the materials dimensionality to their ultimate thinness is a promising route to unveil new physical phenomena, and potentially improve the performance of devices. Among recent 2D materials, analogs of graphene, the group IV elements have attracted much attention for their unexpected and tunable physical properties. Depending on the growth conditions and substrates, several structures of silicene, germanene, and stanene can be formed. Here, we report the synthesis of a Kagome lattice of silicene on aluminum (111) substrates. We provide evidence of such an exotic 2D Si allotrope through scanning tunneling microscopy (STM) observations, high-resolution core-level (CL) and angle-resolved photoelectron spectroscopy (ARPES) measurements, along with Density Functional Theory calculations.

13 pages, 6 figures

References in corpus (3)

• Germanene: a novel two-dimensional Germanium allotrope akin to Graphene and Silicene
• The atomic structure of the $\sqrt{3}\times \sqrt{3}$ phase of silicene on Ag(111)
• A bird's eye view on the flat and conic band world of the honeycomb and Kagome lattices: Towards an understanding of 2D Metal-Organic Frameworks electronic structure

Cited by in corpus (1)

• Transition between half-metal and ferromagnetic semiconductor induced by silicon vacancy in epitaxial silicene