Engineering the Band Structures of Zigzag Blue Phosphorene and Arsenene Nanoribbons by Incorporating Edge Corrugations: A First Principles Exploration

Using first principles calculations, we have presented a short study on modulation of band structures and electronic properties of zigzag blue phosphorene (ZbPNR) and arsenene nanoribbons (ZANR) by etching the edges of NRs. We have taken the width of both NRs as N = 8 and corrugated the edges in a cosine-like manner. Optimizing every structure and further investigating their stabilities, it was seen that both the etched NRs are energetically feasible. From the computed band structures, the band gaps were seen to be increased for both the NRs on increasing number of etched layers and direct gap semiconductor nature was recorded. Highest energy gap observed were 2.26 and 2.41 eV for ZbPNR and ZANR, respectively. On further application of electric field, we observed the very interesting semiconductor-to-metallic property transition which was explained by wave function plots. Being elements of same group, a similar trend of band gaps modulations was observed for both NRs. This fascinating method of electronic property tuning of the studied NRs can be useful in various nanoscale electronic applications.