ABSTRACT
The interest in silicene is exactly the same as that for graphene: in being 2D and possessing a linear band structure, the so-called Dirac cone. This chapter concentrates on the properties of a single freestanding silicene sheet. Freestanding means that the silicene sheet is not chemically or physically bonded to any other material. In many ways, silicene share much more with graphene than with silicon. The most fundamental question about a material is its structure. A crystal structure can be defined by giving the Bravais lattice, which describes the geometrical periodicity in space, and the associated basis of atoms in a unit cell. The chapter considers how the structure might change under the influence of external stresses. The most fundamental physical quantities characterizing the mechanical properties are the linear elastic constants or stiffness tensor Cijkl appearing in Hooke's law.
