Stability and electronic properties of hybrid SnO bilayers: SnO/graphene and SnO/BN

Van der Waals structures based on two-dimensional materials have been considered as promising structures for novel nanoscale electronic devices. Two-dimensional SnO films which display intrinsic p-type semiconducting properties were fabricated recently. In this paper, we consider vertically stacked heterostructures consisting of a SnO monolayer with graphene or a BN monolayer to investigate their stability, electronic and transport properties using density functional theory. The calculated results find that the properties of the constituent monolayers are retained in these SnO-based heterostructures, and a p-type Schottky barrier is formed in the SnO/graphene heterostructure. Additionally, the Schottky barrier can be effectively controlled with an external electric field, which is useful characteristic for the van der Waals heterostructure-based electronic devices. In the SnO/BN heterostructure, the electronic properties of SnO are least affected by the insulating monolayer suggesting that the BN monolayer would be an ideal substrate for SnO-based nanoscale devices.