Highly Sensitive and Selective Gas Detection Based
on Silicene
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Abstract
Recent advances in the fabrication
of silicene devices have raised
exciting prospects for practical applications such as gas sensing.
We investigated the gas detection performance of silicene nanosensors
for four different gases (NO, NO<sub>2</sub>, NH<sub>3</sub>, and
CO) in terms of sensitivity and selectivity, employing density functional
theory and nonequilibrium Green’s function method. The structural
configurations, adsorption sites, binding energies and charge transfer
of all studied gas molecules on silicene nanosensors are systematically
discussed in this work. Our results indicate that pristine silicene
exhibits strong sensitivity for NO and NO<sub>2</sub>, while it appears
incapable of sensing CO and NH<sub>3</sub>. In an attempt to overcome
sensitivity limitations due to weak van der Waals interaction of those
latter gas molecules on the device, we doped pristine silicene with
either B or N atoms, leading to enhanced binding energy as well as
charge transfer, and subsequently a significant improvement of sensitivity.
A distinction between the four studied gases based on the silicene
devices appears possible, and thus these promise to be next-generation
nanosensors for highly sensitive and selective gas detection