Molecular beam epitaxy growth of few-layer stanene

Abstract

Two-dimensional topological materials, especially quantum spin Hall insulators, have attracted enormous research interest owing to their potential for applications ranging from low-power electronics to fault-tolerant quantum computation. Stanene—the tin counterpart of graphene—is a promising candidate for room-temperature quantum spin Hall insulators, motivated by its simple atomic structure and considerable band-inversion gap. Nevertheless, one key challenge is to fabricate topological non-trivial stanene on insulating substrates. In this Perspective, we review recent developments in experimental routes to the creation of few-layer stanene films on various substrates. A quantitative comparison between these stanene films on different substrates is also presented.