Physics of Silicene Stripes

By Abdelkader Kara, C. Léandri, M. Dávila, P. Padova, B. Ealet, H. Oughaddou, B. Aufray, G. L. Lay. 2008

142 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Silicene, a monolayer of silicon atoms tightly packed into a two-dimensional honeycomb lattice, is the challenging hypothetical reflection in the silicon realm of graphene, a one-atom thick graphite sheet, presently the hottest material in condensed matter physics. If existing, it would also reveal a cornucopia of new physics and potential applications. Here, we reveal the epitaxial growth of silicene stripes self-aligned in a massively parallel array on the anisotropic silver (110) surface. This crucial step in the silicene “gold rush” could give a new kick to silicon on the electronics road-map and open the most promising route towards wide-ranging applications. A hint of superconductivity in these silicene stripes poses intriguing questions related to the delicate interplay between paired correlated fermions, massless Dirac fermions and bosonic quasiparticles in low dimensions.

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

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f7672b0bb586fa0f4bc5c012707a98a4b1f612be