  For most practical applications in electronic devices, two-dimensional
materials should be transferred onto semiconducting or insulating substrates,
since they are usually generated on metallic substrates. However, the transfer
often leads to wrinkles, damages, contaminations and so on which would destroy
the intrinsic properties of samples. Thus, generating two-dimensional materials
directly on nonmetallic substrates has been a desirable goal for a long time.
Here, via a swarm structure search method and density functional theory, we
employed an insulating N-terminated cubic boron nitride(111) surface as a
substrate for the generation of silicene. The result shows that the silicene
behaves as a ferromagnetic half-metal because of the strong interaction between
silicon and surface nitrogen atoms. The magnetic moments are mainly located on
surface nitrogen sites without bonding silicon atoms and the value is about
0.12 uB. In spin-up channel, it behaves as a direct band gap semiconductor with
a gap of around 1.35 eV, while it exhibits metallic characteristic in spin-down
channel, and the half-metallic band gap is about 0.11 eV. Besides, both the
magnetic and electronic properties are not sensitive to the external
compressive strain. This work maybe open a way for the utility of silicene in
spintronic field.
