Tight-binding model and ab initio calculation of silicene with strong spin-orbit coupling in low-energy limit

Abstract

We carry out both the tight-binding model and the $ab\ initio$ to study the layered silicene, the spin, valley, sublattice degrees of freedom are taken into consider and the effects of electric field, magnetic field, and even the light in finite frequency together with its interesting optical propertice, which are all closely related to the spin-orbit coupling and Rashba coupling and lead to the tunable phase transitions (between the nontrivial topological phase which has nonzero Chern number or nonzero spin Chern number and the trivial phase). An exotic quantum anomalous Hall insulator phase are found which has nonzero spin Chern number and nonzero valley Chern number and as a giant-application-potential spintronic and valleytronics in the two-ternimate devices based on the monolayer silicene for the information transmission. In fact, the gap-out action can be understanded by analyse the Dirac mass as well as the Zeeman splitting or the external-field-induced symmetry-broken, and the changes of gap has a general nonmonotone-variation characteristic under both the effects of electron filed-induced Rashba-coupling $R_{2}(E_{\perp})$ and the electron field-induced band gap, and the band inversion related to the spin-orbit coupling which absorbs both the spin and orbital angular of momentum may happen during this process. The quantized Hall/longitudinal conductivity together with the optical conductivity are also explored, we see that even in the quantum spin Hall phase without any magnetic field, the two-terminate conductivity can be reduced to the value $e^{2}/h$ by controlling the helical edge model, and it can be further reduced to $e^{2}/2h$ by applying the magnetic field which similar to the graphene.