No Arabic abstract
Using ab initio calculations, we study the electronic and structural properties of vacancies and hydrogen adsorbates on trilayer graphene. Those defects are found to share similar low-energy electronic features, since they both remove a pz electron from the honeycomb lattice and induce a defect level near the Fermi energy. However, a vacancy also leaves unpaired $sigma $ electrons on the lattice, which lead to important structural differences and also contribute to magnetism. We explore both ABA and ABC stackings and compare properties such as formation energies, magnetic moments, spin density and the local density of states (LDOS) of the defect levels. These properties show a strong sensitivity to the layer in which the defect is placed and smaller sensitivities to sublattice placing and stacking type. Finally, for the ABC trilayer, we also study how these states behave in the presence of an external field, which opens a tunable gap in the band structure of the non-defective system. The pz defect states show a strong hybridization with band states as the field increases, with reduction and eventually loss of magnetization, and a non-magnetic, midgap-like state is found when the defect is at the middle layer.
Experimental and theoretical studies of manganese deposition on graphene/Ni(111) shows that a thin ferromagnetic Ni3Mn layer, which is protected by the graphene overlayer, is formed upon Mn intercalation. The electronic bands of graphene are affected by Ni3Mn interlayer formation through a slight reduction of n-type doping compared to graphene/Ni(111) and a suppression of the interface states characteristic of graphene/Ni(111). Our DFT-based theoretical analysis of interface geometric, electronic, and magnetic structure gives strong support to our interpretation of the experimental scanning tunneling microscopy, low energy electron diffraction, and photoemission results, and shows that the magnetic structure of graphene is strongly influenced by Ni3Mn formation.
To date, germanene has only been synthesized on metallic substrates. A metallic substrate is usually detrimental for the two-dimensional Dirac nature of germanene because the important electronic states near the Fermi level of germanene can hybridize with the electronic states of the metallic substrate. Here we report the successful synthesis of germanene on molybdenum disulfide (MoS$_2$), a band gap material. Pre-existing defects in the MoS$_2$ surface act as preferential nucleation sites for the germanene islands. The lattice constant of the germanene layer (3.8 $pm$ 0.2 AA) is about 20% larger than the lattice constant of the MoS$_2$ substrate (3.16 AA). Scanning tunneling spectroscopy measurements and density functional theory calculations reveal that there are, besides the linearly dispersing bands at the $K$ points, two parabolic bands that cross the Fermi level at the $Gamma$ point.
The presence in the graphyne sheets of a variable amount of sp2/sp1 atoms, which can be transformed into sp3-like atoms by covalent binding with one or two fluorine atoms, respectively, allows one to assume the formation of fulorinated graphynes (fluorographynes) with variable F/C stoichiometry. Here, employing DFT band structure calculations, we examine a series of fluorographynes, and the trends in their stability, structural and electronic properties have been discussed as depending on their stoichiometry: from C2F3 (F/C= 1.5) to C4F7 (F/C= 1.75).
Multilayered van der Waals structures often lack periodicity, which difficults their modeling. Building on previous work for bilayers, we develop a tight-binding based, momentum space formalism capable of describing incommensurate multilayered van der Waals structures for arbitrary lattice mismatch and/or misalignment between different layers. We demonstrate how the developed formalism can be used to model angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy measurements, and scanning tunnelling spectroscopy which can probe the local and total density of states. The general method is then applied to incommensurate twisted trilayer graphene structures. It is found that the coupling between the three layers can significantly affect the low energy spectral properties, which cannot be simply attributed to the pairwise hybridization between the layers.
The growth, atomic structure, and electronic property of trilayer graphene (TLG) on Ru(0001) were studied by low temperature scanning tunneling microscopy and spectroscopy in combined with tight-binding approximation (TBA) calculations. TLG on Ru(0001) shows a flat surface with a hexagonal lattice due to the screening effect of the bottom two layers and the AB-stacking in the top two layers. The coexistence of AA- and AB-stacking in the bottom two layers leads to three different stacking orders of TLG, namely, ABA-, ABC-, and ABB-stacking. STS measurements combined with TBA calculations reveal that the density of states of TLG with ABC- and ABB-stacking is characterized by one and two sharp peaks near to the Fermi level, respectively, in contrast to the V-shaped feature of TLG with ABA-stacking. Our work demonstrates that TLG on Ru(0001) might be an ideal platform for exploring stacking-dependent electronic properties of graphene.