Highly Effective Conductance Modulation in Planar Silicene Field Effect Devices Due to Buckling.

Silicene is an exciting two-dimensional material that shares many of graphene's electronic properties, but differs in its structural buckling. This buckling allows opening a bandgap in silicene through the application of a perpendicular electric field. Here we show that this buckling also enables highly effective modulation of silicene's conductance by means of an in-plane electric field applied through silicene side gates, which can be realized concurrently within the same silicene monolayer.