  We investigate the transport properties in a zigzag silicene nanoribbon in
the presence of an external electric field. The staggered sublattice potential
and two kinds of Rashba spin-orbit couplings can be induced by the external
electric field due to the buckled structure of the silicene. A bulk gap is
opened by the staggered potential and gapless edge states appear in the gap by
tuning the two kinds of Rashba spin-orbit couplings properly. Furthermore, the
gapless edge states are spin-filtered and are insensitive to the non-magnetic
disorder. These results prove that the quantum spin Hall effect can be induced
by an external electric field in silicene, which may have certain practical
significance in applications for future spintronics device.
