title: Multilayered silicene: the bottom-up approach for a weakly relaxed Si(111) with Dirac surface states.
abstract: Combining first principles investigations and scanning tunneling microscopy, we identify that the presumable van der Waals packed multilayered silicene sheets spontaneously transform into a diamond-structure bulk Si film due to strong interlayer couplings. In contrast to drastic surface reconstruction on conventional Si(111), multilayered silicene prepared by bottom-up epitaxy on Ag(111) exhibits a nearly ideal flat surface with only weak buckling. Without invoking Ag surfactants, √3 ×√3 honeycomb patterns emerge thanks to dynamic fluctuation of mirror-symmetric rhombic phases, similar to monolayered silicene [Chen et al., Phys. Rev. Lett., 2013, 110, 085504]. The weak relaxation enables novel surface states with a Dirac linear dispersion.
authors.affiliation: Beijing National Laboratory for Condensed Matter Physics and Institute of Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100190, China. huili8@iphy.ac.cn smeng@iphy.ac.cn.
authors.forename: Huixia
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Fu
authors.forename: Lan
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Chen
authors.forename: Jian
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Chen
authors.forename: Jinglan
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Qiu
authors.forename: Zijing
authors.initials: Z
authors.lastname: Ding
authors.forename: Jin
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Zhang
authors.forename: Kehui
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Wu
authors.forename: Hui
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Li
authors.forename: Sheng
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Meng