No Arabic abstract
Silicene is a promising 2D Dirac material as a building block for van der Waals heterostructures (vdWHs). Here we investigate the electronic properties of hexagonal boron nitride/silicene (BN/Si) vdWHs using first-principles calculations. We calculate the energy band structures of BN/Si/BN heterostructures with different rotation angles and find that the electronic properties of silicene are retained and protected robustly by the BN layers. In BN/Si/BN/Si/BN heterostructure, we find that the band structure near the Fermi energy is sensitive to the stacking configurations of the silicene layers due to interlayer coupling. The coupling is reduced by increasing the number of BN layers between the silicene layers and becomes negligible in BN/Si/(BN)3/Si/BN. In (BN)n/Si superlattices, the band structure undergoes a conversion from Dirac lines to Dirac points by increasing the number of BN layers between the silicene layers. Calculations of silicene sandwiched by other 2D materials reveal that silicene sandwiched by low-carbon-doped boron nitride or HfO2 is semiconducting.
In van der Waals heterostructures, the periodic potential from the Moire superlattice can be used as a control knob to modulate the electronic structure of the constituent materials. Here we present a nanoscale angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy (Nano-ARPES) study of transferred graphene/h-BN heterostructures with two different stacking angles of 2.4{deg} and 4.3{deg} respectively. Our measurements reveal six replicas of graphene Dirac cones at the superlattice Brillouin zone (SBZ) centers. The size of the SBZ and its relative rotation angle to the graphene BZ are in good agreement with Moire superlattice period extracted from atomic force microscopy (AFM) measurements. Comparison to epitaxial graphene/h-BN with 0{deg} stacking angles suggests that the interaction between graphene and h-BN decreases with increasing stacking angle.
Graphene exhibits promise as a plasmonic material with high mode confinement that could enable efficient hot carrier extraction. We investigate the lifetimes and mean free paths of energetic carriers in free-standing graphene, graphite and a heterostructure consisting of alternating graphene and hexagonal boron nitride layers using ab initio calculations of electron-electron and electron-phonon scattering in these materials. We find that the extremely high lifetimes (3 ps) of low-energy carriers near the Dirac point in graphene, which are a hundred times larger than that in noble metals, are reduced by an order of magnitude due to inter-layer coupling in graphite, but enhanced in the heterostructure due to phonon mode clamping. However, these lifetimes drop precipitously with increasing carrier energy, and are smaller than those in noble metals at energies exceeding 0.5 eV. By analysing the contribution of different scattering mechanisms and inter-layer interactions, we identify desirable spacer layer characteristics - high dielectric constant and heavy atoms - that could pave the way for plasmonic heterostructures with improved hot carrier transport.
Electronic charge rearrangement between components of a heterostructure is the fundamental principle to reach the electronic ground state. It is acknowledged that the density of states distribution of the components governs the amount of charge transfer, but a notable dependence on temperature has not yet been considered, particularly for weakly interacting systems. Here, we experimentally observe that the amount of ground state charge transfer in a van der Waals heterostructure formed by monolayer MoS2 sandwiched between graphite and a molecular electron acceptor layer increases by a factor of three when going from 7 K to room temperature. State-of-the-art electronic structure calculations of the full heterostructure that account for nuclear thermal fluctuations reveal intra-component electron-phonon coupling and inter-component electronic coupling as the key factors determining the amount of charge transfer. This conclusion is rationalized by a model applicable to multi-component van der Waals heterostructures.
Recent research showed that the rotational degree of freedom in stacking 2D materials yields great changes in the electronic properties. Here we focus on an often overlooked question: are twisted geometries stable and what defines their rotational energy landscape? Our simulations show how epitaxy theory breaks down in these systems and we explain the observed behaviour in terms of an interplay between flexural phonons and the interlayer coupling, governed by Moire superlattice. Our argument applied to the well-studied MoS$_2$/Graphene system rationalize experimental results and could serve as guidance to design twistronics devices.
Electrochemical intercalation is a powerful method for tuning the electronic properties of layered solids. In this work, we report an electro-chemical strategy to controllably intercalate lithium ions into a series of van der Waals (vdW) heterostructures built by sandwiching graphene between hexagonal boron nitride (h-BN). We demonstrate that encapsulating graphene with h-BN eliminates parasitic surface side reactions while simultaneously creating a new hetero-interface that permits intercalation between the atomically thin layers. To monitor the electrochemical process, we employ the Hall effect to precisely monitor the intercalation reaction. We also simultaneously probe the spectroscopic and electrical transport properties of the resulting intercalation compounds at different stages of intercalation. We achieve the highest carrier density $> 5 times 10^{13} cm^{-2}$ with mobility $> 10^3 cm^2/(Vs)$ in the most heavily intercalated samples, where Shubnikov-de Haas quantum oscillations are observed at low temperatures. These results set the stage for further studies that employ intercalation in modifying properties of vdW heterostructures.