Monte Carlo Study of Electronic Transport in Monolayer InSe

The absence of a band gap in graphene makes it of minor interest for field-effect transistors. Layered metal chalcogenides have shown great potential in device applications thanks to their wide bandgap and high carrier mobility. Interestingly, in the ever-growing library of two-dimensional (2D) materials, monolayer InSe appears as one of the new promising candidates, although still in the initial stage of theoretical studies. Here, we present a theoretical study of this material using density functional theory (DFT) to determine the electronic band structure as well as the phonon spectrum and electron-phonon matrix elements. The electron-phonon scattering rates are obtained using Fermi’s Golden Rule and are used in a full-band Monte Carlo computer program to solve the Boltzmann transport equation (BTE) to evaluate the intrinsic low-field mobility and velocity-field characteristic. The electron-phonon matrix elements, accounting for both long- and short-range interactions, are considered to study the contributions of different scattering mechanisms. Since monolayer InSe is a polar piezoelectric material, scattering with optical phonons is dominated by the long-range interaction with longitudinal optical (LO) phonons while scattering with acoustic phonons is dominated by piezoelectric scattering with the longitudinal (LA) branch at room temperature (T = 300 K) due to a lack of a center of inversion symmetry in monolayer InSe. The low-field electron mobility, calculated considering all electron-phonon interactions, is found to be 110 cm(2)V(−1)s(−1), whereas values of 188 cm(2)V(−1)s(−1) and 365 cm(2)V(−1)s(−1) are obtained considering the long-range and short-range interactions separately. Therefore, the calculated electron mobility of monolayer InSe seems to be competitive with other previously studied 2D materials and the piezoelectric properties of monolayer InSe make it a suitable material for a wide range of applications in next generation nanoelectronics.