Optical Properties of Monolayer Tinene in Electric Fields

TL;DR

This study explores the complex optical absorption features of monolayer tinene under electric fields, revealing unique spectral structures linked to its multi-orbital interactions, spin-orbit coupling, and Coulomb effects.

Contribution

It provides a detailed theoretical analysis of the optical spectra of tinene, highlighting the effects of electric fields on its unique absorption features and orbital contributions.

Findings

Identification of three types of spectral structures: shoulders, symmetric peaks, asymmetric peaks.

Observation of field-induced splitting of shoulder structures due to spin-split bands.

Distinct optical properties of tinene compared to graphene, silicene, and germanene.

Abstract

Monolayer tinene presents rich absorption spectra in electric fields. There are three kinds of special structures, namely shoulders, logarithmically symmetric peaks and asymmetric peaks in the square-root form, corresponding to the optical excitations of the extreme points, saddle points and constant-energy loops. With the increasing field strength, two splitting shoulder structures, which are dominated by the parabolic bands of ${5p_z}$ orbitals, come to exist because of the spin-split energy bands. The frequency of threshold shoulder declines to zero and then linearly grows. The third shoulder at ${0.75 \sim 0.85}$ eV mainly comes from (${5p_x,5p_y}$) orbitals. The former and the latter orbitals, respectively, create the saddle-point symmetric peaks near the M point, while they hybridize with one another to generate the loop-related asymmetric peaks. Tinene quite differs from graphene, silicene, and germanene. The special relationship among the multi-orbital chemical bondings, spin-orbital couplings and Coulomb potentials accounts for the feature-rich optical properties.