  Antimonene is a novel two-dimensional topological semiconductor material with
strain driven tunable electronic structure for future electronic and spintronic
devices, but the growth of clean antimonene is not fully understood. In this
work, the growth process of antimonene on silver substrate has been studied in
detail by using density functional theory and particle swarm optimization
algorithms. The results show that, in addition to the experimental reported
flat honeycomb and $\beta$-phase antimonene, $\alpha$-phase antimonene was
observed to be able to grow on thus substrates, and the phases of antimonene
were deeply dependent on the reconstructed supercells and surface alloys. It
has been demonstrated that the surface alloys on substrate play an active role
in the growth of antimonene.
