A Brief History of Silicene

Abstract

Research on silicene shows a fast and steady growth that has increased our tool-box of novel 2D materials with exceptional potential applications in materials science. Especially after the experimental synthesis of silicene on substrates in 2012 has attracted substantial interest from both theoretical and experimental community. Every day, new people from various disciplines join this rapidly growing field. The aim of this book is to serve as a fast entry to the field these newcomers and as a long-living reference to the growing community. To achieve this goal, the book is designed to emphasize the most crucial developments from both theoretical and experimental points of view since the start of the silicene field with the first theoretical paper proposing the structure of silicene. We provide the general concepts and ideas such that the book is accessible to everybody from graduate students to senior researchers and we refer the reader interested in the details to the relevant literature. In the next paragraphs, we present a brief history of silicene where we highlight, in the chronological order, the important works that shaped our understanding of silicene.The atomic and electronic structure of the materials that we now call silicene and germanene was investigated for the first time by Takeda and Shiraishi, a decade before graphene was obtained by exfoliation from the parent graphite crystal (Takeda and Shiraishi 1994). Using density functional theory (DFT) (Hohenberg and Kohn 1964), they have shown that it is energetically favorable for silicene and germanene to become buckled instead of staying planar, as carbon atoms do in the case of graphene. The band structure of silicene was also reported but there was no emphasis on the linear crossing at the Fermi level, namely the Dirac cone. This visionary paper was ignored for almost a decade for two main reasons. First, there was a common belief that these two-dimensional (2D) materials cannot exist in nature (Peierls 1934;Landau 1937;Mermin 1968). Second, it was hard to believe that silicon could acquire an sp 2 -like hybridization because it always preferred sp 3 hybridization (Fagan et al. 2000).

Absorption of Isopropanol on Surface of Defect Silicene

“…Silicene is a novel 2D material with many promising properties for application in electronics [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9]. Silicence is also strongly expected to be a high sensitive material for the use in gas sensing application [10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17].…”