Chlorine termination of Silicene on Silver (111)

Silicene is the 2D form of silicon, which grows readily on silver (111) as single layers or even bi-layers, showing several surface reconstructions in scanning tunneling microscopy images. Discrete Fourier transform calculations of halide-terminated single and multi-layers predict superconducting as well as topological behavior. In fact, a previous study [1] found possible superconductivity in plain silicene/silver, which – so far – we have been unable to confirm. We successfully grew silicene on silver (111) crystals and imaged them using scanning tunneling microscopy/spectroscopy at 4.2 K. The topographic and spectroscopic results on chlorine-terminated surfaces will be presented.
[1] Lan Chen, et. al., Appl. Phys. Lett. 102, 081602 (2013)