Strain and electric field tunable electronic transport in armchair phosphorene nanodevice with normal-metal electrodes

Abstract

Phosphorene, one of the graphene counterparts, is believed to have promising potential to be utilized in nanoelectronics due to its significant properties. Phosphorene has a nonplanar puckered structure with high anisotropy, which enables the elastic strain or external field to tune its electronic structure. In this work, we propose a nanodevice model based on an armchair phosphorene nanoribbon (APNR) with normal-metal electrodes and study the tuning effect of elastic strain and electric field on the electronic transport properties. We first confirm that the APNR can be driven to be of metallic conduction with linear dispersion around the Fermi level, by applying a critical compressive strain. After applying a perpendicular electric field, the APNR turns out to be a band insulator. Furthermore, we calculate the dc conductance and density of states (DOS) of the nanodevice, where the APNR is connected to normal-metal electrodes. The numerical results show that in the absence of an electric field, the nanodevice possesses peak values of conductance and DOS at the Fermi level. Once the electric field is applied, a gap emerges around the Fermi level in the conductance, which suggests that the nanodevice is turned off by the external electric field. Our investigation on the present system could be useful in the development of a field-effect nanodevice based on monolayer phosphorene.