Electronic structure of silicon-based nanostructures

Abstract

We have developed a unifying tight-binding Hamiltonian that can account for the electronic properties of recently proposed Si-based nanostructures, namely, Si graphene-like sheets and Si nanotubes. We considered the $s{p}^{3}{s}^{*}$ and $s{p}^{3}$ models up to first- and second-nearest neighbors, respectively. Our results show that the Si graphene-like sheets considered here are metals or zero-gap semiconductors, and that the corresponding Si nanotubes follow the so-called Hamada's [Phys. Rev. Lett. 68, 1579 (1992)] rule. Comparison to a recent ab initio calculation is made.