Growth Behavior and Evolution of Electronic Structures for Silicene on Ag(111) from Monolayer to Multilayer

Chun-Liang Lin^1*

¹Department of Electrophysics, National Chiao Tung University, Hsinchu, Taiwan

* Presenter:Chun-Liang Lin, email:clin@nctu.edu.tw

Silicene, a two-dimensional single-layer honeycomb sheet of silicon, has attracted much attention as an exotic new material. The structure of monolayer silicene grown on Ag(111) has been confirmed in 2012 [1] and soon after many techniques have been applied to uncover the mystery of it [2, 3]. In this work, silicene on Ag(111) was investigated by low-temperature scanning tunneling microscopy (STM) together with metastable atom electron spectroscopy (MAES). Novel growth behavior is found during the transition from the single layer silicene to the multilayer silicene. First, the Ag(111) surface is fully covered by single layer silicene. As the deposition amount increases, multilayer silicene appears and the bare Ag(111) surface reappears reflecting the difference in the surface energies. MAES spectra previously have shown that the electronic structure of the outermost layer in multilayer silicene is essentially identical to that of Si(111)√3×√3-Ag [4]. Here, it further manifests a significant spectroscopic difference in between monolayer and multilayer silicene grown on Ag(111).

References
[1] C. L. Lin et al., Appl. Phys. Express 5, 045802 (2012). [2] C. L. Lin et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 110, 076801 (2013) [3] A. J. Mannix et al., ACS Nano 8, 7538 (2014) [4] C. L. Lin et al., J. Phys. Chem. C 120, 6689 (2016)

Keywords: Silicene, Growth, Electronic Structure, STM, MAES