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Chemical scissors cut phosphorene nanostructures and their novel electronic properties

Phosphorene, a recently fabricated two dimensional puckered honeycomb structure of phosphorus, showed promising properties for applications of nano-electronics. In this work, we report our findings of chemical scissors effects on phosphorene, using first principles density functional theory methods. It was found that several chemical species, such as H, F, Cl and OH group, can act effectively as scissors to cut phosphorene. Phosphorus chains and nanoribbons can be obtained using different surface coverage of the chemical species. The scissor effects of these species are resulted from their strong chemical bonds with the P atoms. Species such as O, S and Se were not able to cut phosphorene nanostructures due to their lack of strong binding with P. The electronic structure calculations of the produced P-chains reveal that the saturated chain is an insulator while the pristine chain demonstrates a Dirac point at X with a Fermi velocity of 8*10E5 m/s. The obtained zigzag phosphorene nanoribbons show either metallic or semiconducting behaviors, depending on the treatment of the edge P atoms.