Pis’ma v ZhETF, vol. 105, iss. 2, pp. 105 – 105 2017 January 25 c Modulation of band gap by normal strain and an applied electric field in SiC-based heterostructures1) M.Luo+2), Y.E.Xu+∗, Y.X. SongЧ +Department of Electronic Engineering, Shang Hai Jian Qiao University, 201306 Shanghai, China ∗School of Microelectronic of Fudan University, 200433 Shanghai, China ЧKey Laboratory of Polar Materials and Devices, East China Normal University, 200241 Shanghai, China Submitted 24 October 2016 Resubmitted 8 December 2016 DOI: 10.7868/S0370274X17020096 Currently, the van der Waals (vdW) heterostructures comprised of different types of chemically different 2D materials have attracted considerable interest and may have some potential use in future nanoelectronic devices. <...> In order to find its potential applications,we examine the possible modulation of electronic structure of external electric field by using first-principles calculations. <...> The first-principles method is based on density functional theory (DFT), which is implemented in the VASP package. <...> Application of the normal strain and the E-field is found to modulate the band gap of the vdW heterostructures. <...> As shown in Fig. 1c, the system has a direct band gap of 1.33 eV at the equilibrium state. <...> The compressive strain has much influence on the band gap of the vdW heterostructures, and the band gap gets an increment to 1.629 eV when the distance is about 2.8˚ A. The results of charge density differences and electrostatic potential imply that more electrons are likely to transfer from WS2 to SiC monolayer. <...> More interesting phenomena are found when an E-field was applied. <...> The band gap first increases and then decreases, which approximatively shows a parabola-like relationwith the Efield. <...> The band structures and Fig. 1. (Color online) Top (a) and side (b) view of the WS2/SiC vdW heterostructures, the interlayer distance changes along the c-axis. (c) – Binding energy and energy band gap of the nanocomposite as a function of the interlayer distance. <...> The black circles denote the binding energy and the red squares represent the band gap. (d) – Energy band gap of the nanocomposite as a function of the external electric <...>