Strain induced bandgap engineering on two-dimensional SiC/GeC in-plane heterostructures

The emergence of in-plane (monolayer stitched together seamlessly) heterostructures from transition-metal di-chalcogenides family (Nature Materials 13, 1135 (2014)) has opened up new realms in materials science, device physics, and engineering. Bandgap engineering by introducing strain is a promising method for tuning bandgaps and band alignments in designing such in-plane heterostructures. Our preliminary studies on the two-dimensional SiC/GeC in-plane heterostructures found that bandgaps of SiC and GeC sheets vary with the strain and a transition between direct and indirect bandgap occurs under certain strains. The interface effect, on the other hand, will also play an important role when SiC and GeC sheets are combined to form in-plane heterostructures and will be discussed in our presentation.