Tunable Bandgap Opening in the Proposed Structure of Silicon Doped Graphene

TL;DR

This paper introduces a silicon-doped graphene structure with a tunable bandgap up to 2 eV, demonstrating advantages over previous methods due to wide gap tuning and minimal dependence on lattice geometry.

Contribution

The study proposes a specific silicon-doped graphene structure and uses ab initio calculations to show its wide and tunable bandgap, surpassing previous bandgap engineering techniques.

Findings

Silicon doping induces a bandgap up to 2 eV in graphene.

The bandgap can be tuned by silicon concentration and unit cell geometry.

The structure's bandgap is largely independent of lattice geometry.

Abstract

A specific structure of doped graphene with substituted silicon impurity is introduced and ab. initio density-functional approach is applied for energy band structure calculation of proposed structure. Using the band structure calculation for different silicon sites in the host graphene, the effect of silicon concentration and unit cell geometry on the bandgap of the proposed structure is also investigated. Chemically silicon doped graphene results in an energy gap as large as 2eV according to DFT calculations. As we will show, in contrast to previous bandgap engineering methods, such structure has significant advantages including wide gap tuning capability and its negligible dependency on lattice geometry.