title: Silicene field-effect transistors operating at room temperature.
abstract: Free-standing silicene, a silicon analogue of graphene, has a buckled honeycomb lattice and, because of its Dirac bandstructure combined with its sensitive surface, offers the potential for a widely tunable two-dimensional monolayer, where external fields and interface interactions can be exploited to influence fundamental properties such as bandgap and band character for future nanoelectronic devices. The quantum spin Hall effect, chiral superconductivity, giant magnetoresistance and various exotic field-dependent states have been predicted in monolayer silicene. Despite recent progress regarding the epitaxial synthesis of silicene and investigation of its electronic properties, to date there has been no report of experimental silicene devices because of its air stability issue. Here, we report a silicene field-effect transistor, corroborating theoretical expectations regarding its ambipolar Dirac charge transport, with a measured room-temperature mobility of ∼100 cm(2) V(-1) s(-1) attributed to acoustic phonon-limited transport and grain boundary scattering. These results are enabled by a growth-transfer-fabrication process that we have devised--silicene encapsulated delamination with native electrodes. This approach addresses a major challenge for material preservation of silicene during transfer and device fabrication and is applicable to other air-sensitive two-dimensional materials such as germanene and phosphorene. Silicene's allotropic affinity with bulk silicon and its low-temperature synthesis compared with graphene or alternative two-dimensional semiconductors suggest a more direct integration with ubiquitous semiconductor technology.
authors: Microelectronics Research Centre, The University of Texas at Austin, Texas 78758, USA.
authors: Li
authors: L
authors: Tao
authors: Laboratorio MDM, IMM-CNR, via C. Olivetti 2, Agrate Brianza, I-20864, Italy.
authors: Eugenio
authors: E
authors: Cinquanta
authors: Laboratorio MDM, IMM-CNR, via C. Olivetti 2, Agrate Brianza, I-20864, Italy.
authors: Daniele
authors: D
authors: Chiappe
authors: Laboratorio MDM, IMM-CNR, via C. Olivetti 2, Agrate Brianza, I-20864, Italy.
authors: Carlo
authors: C
authors: Grazianetti
authors: Laboratorio MDM, IMM-CNR, via C. Olivetti 2, Agrate Brianza, I-20864, Italy.
authors: Marco
authors: M
authors: Fanciulli
authors: Sensors and Electron Devices Directorate, US Army Research Laboratory, Adelphi, Maryland 20723, USA.
authors: Madan
authors: M
authors: Dubey
authors: Laboratorio MDM, IMM-CNR, via C. Olivetti 2, Agrate Brianza, I-20864, Italy.
authors: Alessandro
authors: A
authors: Molle
authors: Microelectronics Research Centre, The University of Texas at Austin, Texas 78758, USA.
authors: Deji
authors: D
authors: Akinwande