Phononic thermal conductivity in silicene: the role of vacancy defects and boundary scattering.

We calculate the thermal conductivity of free-standing silicene using the phonon Boltzmann transport equation within the relaxation time approximation. In this calculation, we investigate the effects of sample size and different scattering mechanisms such as phonon-phonon, phonon-boundary, phonon-isotope and phonon-vacancy defect. We obtain some similar results to earlier works using a different model and provide a more detailed analysis of the phonon conduction behavior and various mode contributions. We show that the dominant contribution to the thermal conductivity of silicene, which originates from the in-plane acoustic branches, is about 70% at room temperature and this contribution becomes larger by considering vacancy defects. Our results indicate that while the thermal conductivity of silicene is significantly suppressed by the vacancy defects, the effect of isotopes on the phononic transport is small. Our calculations demonstrate that by removing only one of every 400 silicon atoms, a substantial reduction of about 58% in thermal conductivity is achieved. Furthermore, we find that the phonon-boundary scattering is important in defectless and small-size silicene samples, especially at low temperatures.

Coulomb drag in anisotropic systems: a theoretical study on a double-layer phosphorene.

We theoretically study the Coulomb drag resistivity in a double-layer electron system with highly anisotropic parabolic band structure using Boltzmann transport theory. As an example, we consider a double-layer phosphorene on which we apply our formalism. This approach, in principle, can be tuned for other double-layered systems with paraboloidal band structures. Our calculations show the rotation of one layer with respect to another layer can be considered a way of controlling the drag resistivity in such systems. As a result of rotation, the off-diagonal elements of the drag resistivity tensor have non-zero values at any temperature. In addition, we show that the anisotropic drag resistivity is very sensitive to the direction of momentum transfer between two layers due to highly anisotropic inter-layer electron-electron interaction and also the plasmon modes. In particular, the drag anisotropy ratio, [Formula: see text], can reach up to [Formula: see text]3 by changing the temperature. Furthermore, our calculations suggest that including the local field correction in the dielectric function changes the results significantly. Finally, We examine the dependence of drag resistivity and its anisotropy ratio on various parameters like inter-layer separation, electron density, short-range interaction and insulating substrate/spacer.

Germanene: the germanium analogue of graphene.

Recently, several research groups have reported the growth of germanene, a new member of the graphene family. Germanene is in many aspects very similar to graphene, but in contrast to the planar graphene lattice, the germanene honeycomb lattice is buckled and composed of two vertically displaced sub-lattices. Density functional theory calculations have revealed that free-standing germanene is a 2D Dirac fermion system, i.e. the electrons behave as massless relativistic particles that are described by the Dirac equation, which is the relativistic variant of the Schrödinger equation. Germanene is a very appealing 2D material. The spin-orbit gap in germanene (~24 meV) is much larger than in graphene (<0.05 meV), which makes germanene the ideal candidate to exhibit the quantum spin Hall effect at experimentally accessible temperatures. Additionally, the germanene lattice offers the possibility to open a band gap via for instance an externally applied electrical field, adsorption of foreign atoms or coupling with a substrate. This opening of the band gap paves the way to the realization of germanene based field-effect devices. In this topical review we will (1) address the various methods to synthesize germanene (2) provide a brief overview of the key results that have been obtained by density functional theory calculations and (3) discuss the potential of germanene for future applications as well for fundamentally oriented studies.

Interfering Bloch waves in a 1D electron system.

Using low-temperature scanning tunnelling spectroscopy we have studied the spatial variation of confined electronic states between neighbouring atomic chains on a Ge(001)/Pt surface. The quasi-one-dimensional electronic states reside in the troughs between the atomic chains and exhibit a profound Bloch character along the chain direction. In the proximity of defects an enhancement of the oscillatory standing wave pattern in the density of states is found. The spatial variation of the standing wave pattern can be explained by an interference of incoming and reflected Bloch waves.