For most practical applications in electronic devices, two-dimensional materials should be transferred onto semiconducting or insulating substrates, since they are usually generated on metallic substrates. However, the transfer often leads to wrinkles, damages, contaminations and so on which would destroy the previous properties of samples. Thus, generating two-dimensional materials directly on nonmetallic substrates has been a desirable goal for a long time. Here, via a swarm structure search method and density functional theory, we employed an insulating cubic boron nitride (c-BN) as a substrate for the generation of silicene. The result shows that the silicene behaves as ferromagnetic half-metal because of the strong interaction between silicon and nitrogen atoms on c-BN(111) surface. The magnetic moments are mostly located on nitrogen sites without bonding silicon atoms on surface and the value is 0.12 uB. In spin-up channel, it behaves as a direct band gap semiconductor with a gap of 1.35 eV, while it exhibits metallic characteristic in spin-down channel. The half-metallic band gap is 0.11 eV. Besides, both the magnetic and electronic properties are not sensitive to the external compressive strain. This work maybe open a way for the utility of silicene in spintronic field.

Published in: "arXiv Material Science".