  Antimonene has attracted much attention for its high carrier mobility and
suitable band gap for electronic, optoelectronic, and even spintronic devices.
To tailor its properties for such applications, strain engineering may be
adopted. However, such 2D crystals may prefer to exist in the rippled form due
to the instability of long-range orders, and rippling has been shown to have a
contrasting, significant impact on the electronic properties of various 2D
materials, which complicates the tuning process. Hence, the effects of rippling
on the electronic properties of antimonene under strain are herein investigated
by comparing antimonene in its rippled and flat forms. DFT calculations are
performed to compute the structural and electronic parameters, where uniaxial
compression of up to 7.5% is applied along the armchair and zigzag directions
to study the anisotropic behavior of the material. Highly stable properties
such as the work function and band gap are obtained for the rippled structures,
where they are fully relaxed, regardless of the compression level, and these
properties do not deviate much from those of the pristine structure under no
strain. In contrast, various changes are observed in their flat counterparts.
The mechanisms behind the different results are thoroughly explained by
analyses of the density of states and structure geometry. The out-of-plane
dipole moments of the rippled structures are also presented to give further
insights into potential applications of rippled antimonene in sensors,
actuators, triboelectric nanogenerators, etc. This work presents extensive data
and thorough analysis on the effect of rippling on antimonene. The
identification of optimal ripple amplitudes for which the electronic properties
of the pristine condition can be recovered will be highly significant in
guiding the rational design and architecture of antimonene-based devices.
