Electronic structures and transport properties of silicene on Ag surface

It has been predicted from first-principle that ``silicene'', a two-dimensional buckled honeycomb structure of silicon, is thermally stable and has a graphene-like band structure. In experiments, epitaxial silicene were observed to form at hexagonal Ag(111) and $\mathrm{ZrB_2(0001)}$ surfaces. However, electronic structure and transport properties related to silicene have not been thoroughly studied. In this work, we have studied band structures of silicene on top of Ag surface using density-functional theory. The effective band structure mapped onto $1\times1$ unit cell of monolayer silicene on Ag(111) surface could be compared directly with Angle-Resolved Photoemission Spectra (ARPES). We have also studied electronic transport property across monolayer and bilayer silicene sheets using the Non-Equilibrium Green's Function (NEGF) method. The transmission curve shows a maximum at Fermi energy for the monolayer silicene case, but shows a minimum for the bilayer silicene case, which can be explained by their band structures.