Silicene grown on silver surface

Abstract

  In this article, we present the results of our latest work about silicene, which is a two-dimensional allotrope of Si with a hexagonal honeycomb structure similar to graphene, grown on Ag(111) by using scanning tunneling microscopy/spectroscopy, low energy electron diffraction, and density functional theory calculations. We demonstrated that silicene that does not exist in nature is grown on Ag(111), and determined the geometric structure experimentally. From Landau level spectroscopy using a scanning tunneling microscope, we have found that the Dirac fermion character, which should be preserved in freestanding silicene, loses due to strong electronic hybridization between silicene and the underlying Ag(111) substrate.