Strain Effects in Twisted Spiral Antimonene

Van der Waals (vdW) layered materials exhibit fruitful novel physical properties. The energy band of such materials depends strongly on their structures, and a tremendous variation in their physical properties can be deduced from a tiny change in inter-layer spacing, twist angle, or in-plane strain. In this work, a kind of vdW layered material of spiral antimonene is constructed, and the strain effects in the material are studied. The spiral antimonene is grown on a germanium (Ge) substrate and is induced by a helical dislocation penetrating through few atomic-layers of antimonene (β-phase). The as-grown spiral is intrinsically strained, and the lattice distortion is found to be pinned around the dislocation. Both spontaneous inter-layer twist and in-plane anisotropic strain are observed in scanning tunneling microscope (STM) measurements. The strain in the spiral antimonene can be significantly modified by STM tip interaction, leading to a variation in the surface electronic density of states (DOS) and a large modification in the work function of up to a few hundreds of millielectron-volts (meV). Those strain effects are expected to have potential applications in building up novel piezoelectric devices.