Many-body Effect, Carrier Mobility, and Device Performance of Hexagonal Arsenene and Antimonene

Two-dimensional (2D) semiconductors are very promising channel materials in next-generation field effect transistors (FETs) due to the enhanced gate electrostatics and smooth surface. Two new 2D materials, arsenene and antimonene (As and Sb analogues of graphene), have been fabricated very recently. Here, we provide the first investigation of the many-body effect, carrier mobility, and device performance of monolayer (ML) hexagonal arsenene and antimonene based on accurate ab initio methods. The quasi-particle band gaps of ML arsenene and antimonene by using the GW approximation are 2.47 and 2.38 eV, respectively. The optical band gaps of ML arsenene and antimonene from the GW-Bethe–Salpeter equation are 1.6 and 1.5 eV, with exciton binding energies of 0.9 and 0.8 eV, respectively. The carrier mobility is found to be considerably low in ML arsenene (21/66 cm2/V·s for electron/hole) and moderate in ML antimonene (150/510 cm2/V·s for electron/hole). In terms of the ab initio quantum transport simulations, the optimized sub-10 nm arsenene and antimonene FETs can satisfy both the low power and high performance requirements in the International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors in the next decade. Together with the observed high stability under ambient condition, ML arsenene and antimonene are very attractive for nanoscale optoelectronic and electronic devices.