ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the state-of-the-art advances in silicene, in particular its formation physical and chemical properties, and relevant emerging applications. It discusses the recent advances in experimental investigations and focuses on the fabrication, structural characterization, and electronic properties. Despite the fact that silicene was theoretically predicted back in 1994, the breakthrough in experimental synthesis of silicene started in 2010. Several groups reported successful fabrication of monolayer/few-layer silicene sheet on different substrates simultaneously. Angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy (ARPES) and scanning tunneling microscopy (STM)/scanning tunneling spectroscopy (STS) are two major spectroscopic techniques, which were used to characterize the electronic structure of silicene. As the silicon counterpart of graphene, silicene exhibits some similar electronic properties to those of graphene, such as massless Dirac fermion, quantum spin Hall effect (QSHE), and high Fermi velocity. However, unlike graphene, silicene has a tunable band gap. Optical properties can be derived from electronic band structure and they are discussed together with the aforementioned electronic properties.
