  Phosphorene, a recently fabricated two dimensional puckered honeycomb
structure of phosphorus, showed promising properties for applications of
nano-electronics. In this work, we report our findings of chemical scissors
effects on phosphorene, using first principles density functional theory
methods. It was found that several chemical species, such as H, F, Cl and OH
group, can act effectively as scissors to cut phosphorene. Phosphorus chains
and nanoribbons can be obtained using different surface coverage of the
chemical species. The scissor effects of these species are resulted from their
strong chemical bonds with the P atoms. Species such as O, S and Se were not
able to cut phosphorene nanostructures due to their lack of strong binding with
P. The electronic structure calculations of the produced P-chains reveal that
the saturated chain is an insulator while the pristine chain demonstrates a
Dirac point at X with a Fermi velocity of 8*10E5 m/s. The obtained zigzag
phosphorene nanoribbons show either metallic or semiconducting behaviors,
depending on the treatment of the edge P atoms.
