Eur. Phys. J. B (2013) 86: 457
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjb/e2013-40818-3

Regular Article

Enhanced thermopower of gated silicene

¹ Department of Physics, Shaoxing University, Shaoxing 312000, P.R. China
² Department of Mathematics and Physics, Shanghai University of Electric Power, Shanghai 200090, P.R. China
³ Key Laboratory for Advanced Microstructure Materials of the Ministry of Education and Department of Physics, Tongji University, Shanghai 200092, P.R. China

^a e-mail: yhyan@fudan.edu.cn

Received: 8 September 2013
Received in final form: 23 September 2013
Published online: 4 November 2013

Abstract

We theoretically investigate the thermopower of silicene systems in an external electric field perpendicular to the silicene sheet. In the absence of the field, we estimate that the thermopower of pure silicene is of order ~80 μV/K. When a finite field is applied, a comparatively big band gap is opened and the thermopower is thus enhanced by several times as compared with the case without the field. The effect of disorder is also studied, and we find only minimal difference.