Effect of the vacancy on the electrical transport properties of boron nitride nanosheets

Abstract

Vacancies occur naturally in all crystalline materials. A vacancy is a point defect in a crystal in which an atom is removed at one of the lattice sites. The defect could be imported during the synthesis of the material or be added by defect engineering. In this paper by employing the density functional theory as well as the non-equilibrium Green’s function approach, the structure and electronic properties of the perfect and defected BN nanosheet would be obtained and compared. Besides, the influence of the vacancy defect position is evaluated. For this purpose, the defect is considered at the center, left, and right hand sides of the nanosheet. It is seen that the electric current changes by changing the position of the vacancy defect, which is related to the electronic structures of BN nanosheets. In addition, the transmission and conductance for BN nanosheets with vacancy continuously change by changing the bias voltage. The obtained results can benefit the design and implementation of BN nanosheets in nanoelectronic systems and devices.