Quantum spin Hall effect in silicene and two-dimensional germanium.

By Cheng-Cheng Liu, W. Feng, Yugui Yao. Physical Review Letters, 2011

1,777 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We investigate the spin-orbit opened energy gap and the band topology in recently synthesized silicene as well as two-dimensional low-buckled honeycomb structures of germanium using first-principles calculations. We demonstrate that silicene with topologically nontrivial electronic structures can realize the quantum spin Hall effect (QSHE) by exploiting adiabatic continuity and the direct calculation of the Z(2) topological invariant. We predict that the QSHE can be observed in an experimentally accessible low temperature regime in silicene with the spin-orbit band gap of 1.55 meV, much higher than that of graphene. Furthermore, we find that the gap will increase to 2.9 meV under certain pressure strain. Finally, we also study germanium with a similar low-buckled stable structure, and predict that spin-orbit coupling opens a band gap of 23.9 meV, much higher than the liquid nitrogen temperature.

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Materials Chemistry

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d37af3b8a64b2884631a0b4730b3ce457c6b9e22

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

In Materials Chemistry

Citations in the corpus

Novel effects of strains in graphene and other two dimensional materials (2015, background): “It has been suggested that strain can be used to experimentally observe quantum spin Hall effect in this compound [214].”