A computational study of electric and magnetic properties of silicon carbon (SiC) armchair nanoribbons

Abstract

SiC is a two-dimensional semiconductor with a direct band gap. Many authors studied its electric and magnetic properties in sheet and ribbon shapes. The previous papers have shown that SiC sheet and full saturated armchair ribbons are non-magnetic (NM) semiconductor while zigzag ribbons are ferromagnetic (FM) semiconductor. In this paper, we saturate only C (CH) and Si (SiH) atoms of armchair ribbon by hydrogen and study its electric and magnetic properties by density functional theory (DFT). Our results show that CH, saturated carbon atoms in armchair ribbon, can show both FM and antiferromagnetic (AFM) semiconductor states while SiH, saturated silicon atoms in armchair ribbon, can show both FM half-metal and AFM metallic states. We found that the total magnetic moment of the unit cell is about 2 μB. Our results confirm that armchair ribbons can show many different magnetic states only by hydrogen saturation.