Prediction of Stable and High-Performance Charge Transport in Zigzag Tellurene Nanoribbons

The 2-D materials possess application perspective in semiconductor logic devices owing to their bonding free surface carrier transport. However, the scaling transistor width-induced edge issues have significantly limited their surface transport within the lateral direction, leading to effective mass increasing, and bandgap fluctuations. Therefore, it is important to find a novel 2-D material with both excellent surface transport and immunity to edge effect. In this paper, inspired by the recently discovered tellurene and its unique Te-Te bonds, the edge effect on the transport characteristics of tellurene is studied theoretically in the form of tellurene nanoribbons (TNRs). Among the four edge types, three of them exhibit semiconducting characteristic owing to the unique bonding property of Te. Simulation results demonstrate that the tetragonal edges (TEs) in zigzag TNRs (ZTNRs) almost have no influence on surface transport, resulting in minimized bandgap and effective mass variations, compared to that of graphene nanoribbons, and Si and Ge nanowires. Transport behaviors of the TE-ZTNRs are investigated using a metal-oxide- semiconductor transistor model and a multiscale simulation flow, with the calculated current densities exceeding 1 mA/μm and the on-off ratios over 1011. Based on the results, an explicit prediction that the TE-ZTNRs are competitive candidates for nanoscale transistor materials is proposed.