Possible Electric-Field-Induced Superconducting States in Doped Silicene

Li Da Zhang, Fan Yang, Yugui Yao*

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

42 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

Silicene has been synthesized recently, with experimental evidence showing possible superconductivity in the doped case. The noncoplanar low-buckled structure of this material inspires us to study the pairing symmetry of the doped system under a perpendicular external electric field. Our study reveals that the electric field induces an interesting quantum phase transition from the singlet chiral d + id′-wave superconducting phase to the triplet f-wave one. The emergence of the f-wave pairing results from the sublattice-symmetry-breaking caused by the electric field and the ferromagnetic-like intra-sublattice spin correlations at low dopings. Due to the enhanced density of states, the superconducting critical temperature of the system is enhanced by the electric field remarkably. Furthermore, we design a particular dc SQUID experiment to detect the quantum phase transition predicted here. Our results, if confirmed, will inject a new vitality to the familiar Si-based industry through adopting doped silicene as a tunable platform to study different types of exotic unconventional superconductivities.

Original languageEnglish
Article number8203
JournalScientific Reports
Volume5
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 3 Feb 2015

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