  Silicene, a hexagonal buckled 2-D allotrope of silicon, shows potential as a
platform for numerous new applications, and may allow for easier integration
with existing silicon-based microelectronics than graphene. Here, we show that
silicene could function as an ultrafast electrical DNA sequencing device. We
investigated the stability of this novel nano-bio system, its electronic
properties and the pronounced effects on the transverse electronic transport,
i.e., changes in the transmission and the conductance caused by adsorption of
each nucleobase, explored by us through the non-equilibrium Green's function
method. Intriguingly, despite the relatively weak interaction between
nucleobases and silicene, significant changes in the transmittance at zero bias
are predicted by us, in particular for the two nucleobases cytosine and
guanine. Our findings suggest that silicene could be utilized as an
integrated-circuit biosensor as part of a lab-on-a-chip device for DNA
sequencing.
