Magnetic Properties of 3D Transition Metal (Sc–Ni) Doped Plumbene Cite This: RSC Adv., 2020, 10, 6884 Daniel Hashemi * and Hideo Iizuka
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RSC Advances View Article Online PAPER View Journal | View Issue Magnetic properties of 3d transition metal (Sc–Ni) doped plumbene Cite this: RSC Adv., 2020, 10, 6884 Daniel Hashemi * and Hideo Iizuka Recently, a synthesized two-dimensional layer structured material, so-called “plumbene”, has attracted research interests because of its sizeable spin–orbit coupling. To study the potential of this material as a dilute magnetic semiconductor, we computationally investigate the structure, electronic, and magnetic properties of 3d transition metal (TM) doped plumbene using density functional theory (DFT). These calculations show that Ti, V, Cr, Mn, Fe, and Co-doped plumbene systems are magnetic while no magnetic solution was found for Sc and Ni. We also calculate the magnetic couplings between two TM Received 9th December 2019 impurities in the system with an impurity concentration of less than 2%. For V, Mn, Fe, Co-doped Accepted 3rd February 2020 systems with short inter-impurity distances, we obtain a Curie temperature above room temperature DOI: 10.1039/c9ra10337f using the mean-field approximation, indicating the potential for magnetic storage and spintronics rsc.li/rsc-advances applications. Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported Licence. I. Introduction nonvolatile magnetoresistive memories, spin valve, spin-based transistors, and magnetically enhanced optoelectronics devices.27 Two-dimensional (2D) materials, particularly those in group 14, The electronic and magnetic properties of 2D materials can have attracted extensive interest due to their potential in terms be engineered with substitutional doping or adsorbing of TM – of the topological insulating properties,1–8 the chemical reac- elements, which can lead to DMSs in 2D semiconductors.28 34 tivity,9 the magnetic behavior,10,11 and the thermal properties.12 The magnetic substitutional doping can induce the spin and A recently synthesized 2D material, called plumbene13–17 has valley polarization due to the spin–orbit and exchange interac- This article is licensed under a generated much attention because it has the largest spin–orbit tion in transition-metal dichalcogenides (TMDs).35 interaction among all group 14 elements18 as the magnitude of In this paper, inspired by the recent synthesis of plumbene,13 spin–orbit coupling increases approximately as the fourth we use 3d TM elements as magnetic impurities to show that it is Open Access Article. Published on 14 February 2020. Downloaded 10/3/2021 3:00:52 PM. power of the effective nuclear charge. Moreover, rich physical possible to achieve magnetism in plumbene. First, we study the characteristics are expected in plumbene due to strong spin– stability and electronic properties of TM defects in plumbene, orbit coupling (SOC) as compared to graphene and phosphor- and thereaer, the magnetic orders are acquired through the ene,18 i.e. huge host-induced magnetic anisotropy of impurities long-range interaction between the diluted TM-doped systems. due to its strong SOC. In terms of mechanical properties, The Curie temperature is also estimated using the mean-eld a recent molecular dynamics simulation has shown that approximation for the ferromagnetic (FM) cases. plumbene is several times stronger than bulk lead.17 In terms of topological insulating properties, plumbene becomes a topo- logical insulator with a large band gap (z200 meV) through II. Computational details electron doping as shown by ab initio calculations.15 According The calculations were performed within the framework of spin- to theoretical calculations, plumbene is also a good candidate polarized density functional theory (DFT) including SOC, using for realizing the quantum spin Hall effect at room temperature the Vienna ab initio simulation package (VASP).36,37 SOC has (RT).19 Unexpected quantum spin Hall insulating properties a huge impact on the electronic properties of plumbene in such were also reported for bilayer and decorated plumbene.20,21 a way that without taking it into account, the global band gap Over the past decades, there have been many studies disappears.16 The frozen-core full-potential projector regarding the fundamental science of dilute magnetic semi- 38 – augmented-wave method (PAW) was used with the Perdew, conductors (DMSs).22 26 It has been shown that the combination Burke, and Ernzerhof (PBE)39 generalized gradient approxima- of 2D semiconductors and magnetic data storage could lead to tion (GGA). These functionals provide a reasonably good 2D spintronics devices with a wide range of applications such as description of the magnetic states of TM nanostructures such as adatoms40,41 and nanowires.42–44 Toyota Research Institute of North America, Toyota Motor North America, Ann Arbor, The convergence with respect to the size of k-sampling, MI 48105, USA. E-mail: [email protected] cutoff radius, and vacuum thickness was checked. These 6884 | RSC Adv.,2020,10,6884–6892 This journal is © The Royal Society of Chemistry 2020 View Article Online Paper RSC Advances resulted in a k-point mesh of 2 Â 2 Â 1 for Density of States and magnetization densities were visualized using VESTA (DOS) of the TM-doped system, a plane-wave cutoff radius of code.52 600 eV, and a vacuum distance between the periodic images of 15 A.˚ We used the conjugate-gradient algorithm for structural À relaxation with a force convergence criterion of 0.01 eV A˚ 1. III. Results and discussions The pristine plumbene structure was fully optimized. To A. Structure and energetics obtain the fundamental band gap, the electronic band struc- The calculated lattice constant of freestanding plumbene using – tures were calculated by the PBE functional, hybrid Heyd Scu- PBE, HSE03, and HSE06 functionals, as shown on Table 1, are – 45–47 48 seria Ernzerhof functionals (HSE03) and (HSE06). We 4.93 A,˚ 4.88 A,˚ and 4.87 A,˚ respectively, which shows a good used the standard values for the mixing parameter (0.25) and agreement between these methods. The calculated buckling ˚À1 ˚À1 the range-separation parameters of 0.3 A and 0.2 A for heights obtained by PBE, HSE03, and HSE06 functionals are HSE03 and HSE06 functionals, respectively. Charge transfer also 1.01 A,˚ 0.97 A,˚ and 0.97 A,˚ respectively. analysis between TM and plumbene was carried out using Bader The calculated band gap energies are 0.43 eV, 0.50 eV, and 49–51 Â Â formalism. The reciprocal space was sampled by a 6 6 1 0.58 eV using PBE, HSE03, and HSE06 functionals, respectively. k-points mesh in the Brillouin zone of the primitive unit cell. The electronic band structures obtained by these methods are The electronic and magnetic properties of TM-doped systems displayed in Fig. 1(d). It is known that PBE is expected to were studied using the PBE-optimized structures. We used underestimate the band gap energies53–55 which may be re- noncollinear spin polarization in a fully relativistic framework ected in our calculations. HSE functionals are well-established for the TM-doped plumbene systems to determine the easy and more accurate for describing electronic properties of 2D magnetization axis and to calculate the magnetic interaction materials as compared to PBE, but they are computationally between two TM impurities. The structures, charge densities, very expensive.56 We expect the experimental band gap energy to be higher than the calculated PBE band gap of 0.43 eV. Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported Licence. We checked the reliability of the PBE calculations and found consistent results across the PBE and the HSE methods in terms Table 1 Electronic band gap energy, lattice constant, and buckling height (h) of plumbene calculated with the PBE, HSE03, and HSE06 of magnetic con gurations of the Fe-doped system. Due to the functionals high computational workload and the reasonable agreement with the PBE results, we did not perform a similar study with the System PBE HSE03 HSE06 HSE approach. Band gap (eV) 0.43 0.50 0.58 To model the single impurity TM-doped systems, we chose Lattice constant (A)˚ 4.93 4.88 4.87 Â h (A)˚ 1.01 0.97 0.97 a4 2 supercell along the zigzag and armchair directions, respectively. Thus, the PBE lattice constants of a ¼ 19.74 A˚ and This article is licensed under a Open Access Article. Published on 14 February 2020. Downloaded 10/3/2021 3:00:52 PM. Fig. 1 (a and b) Top and side views of buckled plumbene, respectively. The blue solid vectors indicate the primitive vectors. h is the vertical distance between the Pb planes. (c) First Brillouin zone with high-symmetry points. (d) Electronic band structures for plumbene calculated with the HSE06 (blue solid line), HSE03 (brown dotted line), and PBE (red dashed line) functionals. This journal is © The Royal Society of Chemistry 2020 RSC Adv.,2020,10,6884–6892 | 6885 View Article Online RSC Advances Paper Table 2 Binding energy, optimized bond lengths, easy axis, absolute values of spin and orbital moments, charge transfers, energy difference between antiparallel (E[Y) parallel (E[[) spins of the TM impurities sites along zigzag (zi) and armchair (aj) directions, and Curie temperatures for the FM configurations Dopant Sc Ti V Cr Mn Fe Co Ni Pristine Eb (eV) 3.10 2.79 2.54 1.72 1.70 2.61 2.87 3.37 1.97 TM–Pb (A)˚ 2.92 2.80 2.79 2.85 3.02 2.69 2.53 2.50 3.02 Easy axis ^x ^x ^y ^z ^z ^z m |ms|( B) 1.32 2.79 3.98 4.10 2.95 1.52 m |mo|( B) 0.18 0.32 0.04 0.04 0.49 0.22 TM charge transfer (e) À1.09 À0.81 À0.50 À0.36 À0.37 À0.09 +0.04 +0.20 Pb charge transfer (e) +0.35 +0.27 +0.16 +0.12 +0.14 +0.02 À0.01 À0.07 D À À E(z1) (meV) 115 430 576 523 175 TC (K) 445 2023 677 DE(z2) (meV) À83 À125 À98 128 91 12 TC (K) 495 352 46 D À À E(z3) (meV) 57 24 22 43 78 18 TC (K) 220 93 85 166 DE(z4) (meV) À22 À12 1 À34 24 18 TC (K) 4 93 70 D À À À À À E(z5) (meV) 1 77 5 15 16 TC (K) 27 DE(a1) (meV) À45 À125 À78 101 77 17 TC (K) 391 298 66 D À À À À À E(a2) (meV) 12 34 99 23 33 70 TC (K) 132 DE(a3) (meV) 11 À34 À36 À34 13 14 Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported Licence.