Unique dewetting growth of Si on Ag(111)

Naoya Kawakami^1*, Ryuichi Arafune², Emi Minamitani⁴, Noriaki Takagi³, Chun-Liang Lin¹

¹Electrophysics, National Chiao Tung university, Hsinchu, Taiwan
²National Institute for Materials Science, Tsukuba, Japan
³Kyoto University, Kyoto, Japan
⁴Institute for Molecular Science, Okazaki, Japan

* Presenter:Naoya Kawakami, email:kawakami@nctu.edu.tw

A honeycomb sheet of Si, namely silicene, has attracted much attention as a candidate material for electronic and spintronic devices. After the successful synthesis of silicene on Ag(111) [1], various characteristics of silicene has been clarified. However, there remain several questions still to be revealed. The growth behavior of silicene is one of the open question. Although a monolayer silicene wholly covers the substrate surface, further deposition of Si induces dewetting of silicene, even though the temperature is kept constant [2]. This is an exceptional case of the epitaxial growth. We investigated the unique dewetting growth by using scanning tunneling microscopy/spectroscopy (STM/S) and kinetic Monte Carlo (KMC) simulation. A quantitative analysis was performed based on STM observation. The origin of the dewetting was unveiled by combining the experimental results and kMC simulation.

[1] B. Lalmi et al., Appl. Phys. Lett. 97, 223109 (2010).
[2] P. Moras et al., J. Phys.: Condens. Matter 26, 085001 (2014).

Keywords: STM, kinetic Monte Carlo, silicene