# Substrate-induced half-metallic property in epitaxial silicene

## TL;DR

This study demonstrates that silicene grown on an insulating cubic boron nitride substrate exhibits substrate-induced half-metallic ferromagnetic properties, which are stable under external strain and promising for spintronic applications.

## Contribution

The paper introduces a novel method of synthesizing silicene with half-metallic ferromagnetic properties directly on an insulating substrate using computational techniques.

## Key findings

- Silicene on N-terminated cubic boron nitride is a ferromagnetic half-metal.
- The material shows a 1.35 eV band gap in spin-up and metallic behavior in spin-down.
- Properties are stable under external compressive strain.

## Abstract

For most practical applications in electronic devices, two-dimensional materials should be transferred onto semiconducting or insulating substrates, since they are usually generated on metallic substrates. However, the transfer often leads to wrinkles, damages, contaminations and so on which would destroy the intrinsic properties of samples. Thus, generating two-dimensional materials directly on nonmetallic substrates has been a desirable goal for a long time. Here, via a swarm structure search method and density functional theory, we employed an insulating N-terminated cubic boron nitride(111) surface as a substrate for the generation of silicene. The result shows that the silicene behaves as a ferromagnetic half-metal because of the strong interaction between silicon and surface nitrogen atoms. The magnetic moments are mainly located on surface nitrogen sites without bonding silicon atoms and the value is about 0.12 uB. In spin-up channel, it behaves as a direct band gap semiconductor with a gap of around 1.35 eV, while it exhibits metallic characteristic in spin-down channel, and the half-metallic band gap is about 0.11 eV. Besides, both the magnetic and electronic properties are not sensitive to the external compressive strain. This work maybe open a way for the utility of silicene in spintronic field.