Silicene for flexible electronics

TL;DR

This paper investigates silicene's potential for flexible electronics by analyzing its piezoresistance properties through theoretical modeling, highlighting its suitability as an interconnect and strain sensor component in nanoelectronic devices.

Contribution

It introduces a theoretical analysis of silicene's piezoresistance effect, demonstrating its small gauge factor and potential applications in flexible nanoelectronic systems.

Findings

Silicene exhibits a small, sinusoidally dependent piezoresistance gauge factor.

The small gauge factor is due to its robust Dirac cone and strain-independent valley degeneracy.

Proposes silicene as an interconnect and reference piezoresistor in flexible electronics.

Abstract

The outstanding properties of graphene have laid the foundation for exploring graphene-like two-dimensional systems, commonly referred to as 2D-Xenes. Amongst them, silicene is a front-runner owing to its compatibility with current silicon fabrication technologies. Recent works on silicene have unveiled its useful electronic and mechanical properties. The rapid miniaturization of silicon devices and the useful electro-mechanical properties of silicene necessitates the exploration for potential applications of silicene flexible electronics in the nano electro-mechanical systems. Using a theoretical model derived from the integration of \textit{ab-initio} density-functional theory and quantum transport theory, we investigate the piezoresistance effect of silicene in the nanoscale regime. Like graphene, we obtain a small value of piezoresistance gauge factor of silicene, which is sinusoidally dependent on the transport angle. The small gauge factor of silicene is attributed to its robust Dirac cone and strain-independent valley degeneracy. Based on the obtained results, we propose to use silicene as an interconnect in flexible electronic devices and a reference piezoresistor in strain sensors. This work will hence pave the way for exploring flexible electronics applications in other 2D-Xene materials.