Realizing an Epitaxial Stanene with an Insulating Bandgap
Abstract
Stanene, a single atomic layer of Sn in a honeycomb lattice, is predicted a candidate wide bandgap two-dimensional (2D) topological insulator and can host intriguing topological states of matter such as quantum anomalous Hall effect and topological superconductivity with different surface modifications. Despite intensive research efforts, one still cannot obtain bulk-insulating stanene samples-a prerequisite for any transport studies and applications of stanene. Here we show the experimental realization of an epitaxial stanene with an insulating bulk bandgap by using PbTe(111) substrates. With low-temperature molecular beam epitaxy, we are able to grow single layer stanene on PbTe(111). In-situ angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy shows the characteristic stanene bands with its Fermi level lying in the bandgap. Doping Sr in PbTe removes the substrate states located in the stanene gap, resulting in a stanene sample with truly insulating bulk. This experimental progress paves the way for studies of stanene-based topological quantum effects.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1711.07035,
title = {Realizing an Epitaxial Stanene with an Insulating Bandgap},
author = {Yunyi Zang and Tian Jiang and Yan Gong and Zhaoyong Guan and Menghan Liao and Zhe Li and Lili Wang and Wei Li and Canli Song and Ding Zhang and Yong Xu and Ke He and Xucun Ma and Shou-Cheng Zhang and Qi-Kun Xue},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1711.07035},
year = {2018}
}
Comments
17 pages, 9 figures