2017/09/29 by Ping Li, Xiao Li, Wei Zhao +9 · 71 citations
Materials Science · Mathematics · Physics and Astronomy · #Atomic orbital #Condensed matter physics #Dirac (video compression format) #Electron #Graph theory and applications #Graphene #Graphene research and applications #Materials science #Mathematics #Physics #Quantum mechanics #Silicene #Surface (topology) #Surface states #Topological Materials and Phenomena #cond-mat.mes-hall #cond-mat.mtrl-sci
paper · pdf · doi:10.1021/acs.nanolett.7b02855
published in Nano Letters 17(10), 6195-6202 (American Chemical Society) · 6 Figures , Accepted by Nano Letters
openalex publication_date 2017/09/29 · arxiv created 2017/10/01 · arxiv updated 2017/10/05 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
The discovery of intriguing properties related to the Dirac states in graphene has spurred huge interest in exploring its two-dimensional group-IV counterparts, such as silicene, germanene, and stanene. However, these materials have to be obtained via synthesizing on substrates with strong interfacial interactions, which usually destroy their intrinsic π(p z )-orbital Dirac states. Here we report a theoretical study on the existence of Dirac states arising from the p x, y orbitals instead of p z orbitals in silicene on 4H-SiC(0001), which survive in spite of the strong interfacial interactions. We also show that the exchange field together with the spin–orbital coupling give rise to a detectable band gap of 1.3 meV. Berry curvature calculations demonstrate the nontrivial topological nature of such Dirac states with a Chern number C = 2, presenting the potential of realizing quantum anomalous Hall effect for silicene on SiC(0001). Finally, we construct a minimal effective model to capture the low-energy physics of this system. This finding is expected to be also applicable to germanene and stanene and imply great application potentials in nanoelectronics.