Ultra-high mechanical stretchability and controllable topological phase transitions in two-dimensional arsenic

Abstract

The mechanical stretchability is the magnitude of strain which a material can suffer before it breaks. Materials with high mechanical stretchability, which can reversibly withstand extreme mechanical deformation and cover arbitrary surfaces and movable parts, are used for stretchable display devices, broadband photonic tuning and aberration-free optical imaging. Strain can be utilised to control the band structures of materials and can even be utilised to induce a topological phase transition, driving the normal insulators to topological non-trivial materials with non-zero Chern number or Z2 number. Here, we propose a new two-dimensional topological material with ultra-high mechanical stretchability - the ditch-like 2D arsenic. This new anisotropic material possesses a large Poisson's ratio 1.049, which is larger than any other reported inorganic materials and has a ultra-high stretchability 44% along the armchair direction, which is unprecedent in inorganic materials as far as we know. Its minimum bend radius of this material can be as low as 0.66 nm, which is comparable to the radius of carbon-nanotube. Such mechanical properties make this new material be a stretchable semiconductor which could be used to construct flexible display devices and stretchable sensors. Axial strain will make a conspicuous affect on the band structure of the system, and a proper strain along the zigzag direction will drive the 2D arsenic into the topological insulator in which the topological edge state can host dissipation-less spin current and spin transfer toque, which are useful in spintronics devices such as dissipation transistor, interconnect channels and spin valve devices.