Silicon and germanium are the well-known materials used to manufacture electronic devices for the integrated circuits but they themselves are not considered as promising options for interconnecting the devices due to their semiconducting nature. We have discovered that both Si and Ge atoms can form unexpected metallic monolayer structures which are more stable than the extensively studied semimetallic silicene and germanene, respectively. More importantly, the newly discovered two-dimensional allotropes of Si and Ge have Fermi velocities superior to the Dirac fermions in graphene, indicating that the metal wires needed in the silicon-based integrated circuits can be made of Si atom itself without incompatibility, allowing for all-silicon-based integrated circuits.
@article{arxiv.2207.06669,
title = {Atomically-thin metallic Si and Ge allotropes with high Fermi velocities},
author = {Chin-En Hsu and Yung-Ting Lee and Chieh-Chun Wang and Chang-Yu Lin and Yukiko Yamada-Takamura and Taisuke Ozaki and Chi-Cheng Lee},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2207.06669},
year = {2023}
}