Strain engineering the charged-impurity-limited carrier mobility in phosphorene

• We introduce a tight-binding Hamiltonian for strained phosphorene within the linear deformation regime.
• We investigate the effects of the uniaxial strains applied along the principle directions of phosphorene.
• We consider the strain dependence of the charged-impurity-limited carrier mobility in phosphorene.
• We show that a uniaxial strain in the normal or zigzag direction tunes the amount and the isotropy of its carrier mobility.

We investigate, based on the tight-binding model and in the linear deformation regime, the strain dependence of the electronic band structure of phosphorene, exposed to a uniaxial strain in one of its principle directions, the normal, the armchair and the zigzag directions. We show that the electronic band structure of strained phosphorene, for the experimentally accessible carrier densities and the uniaxial strains, is well described by a strain-dependent decoupled electron–hole Hamiltonian. Then, employing the decoupled Hamiltonian, we consider the strain dependence of the charged-impurity-limited carrier mobility in phosphorene, for both types of carriers, arbitrary carrier densities and in both armchair and zigzag directions. We show that a uniaxial tensile (compressive) strain in the normal direction enhances (weakens) the anisotropy of the carrier mobility, while a uniaxial strain in the zigzag direction acts inversely. Moreover applying a uniaxial strain in the armchair direction is shown to be ineffective on the anisotropy of the carrier mobility. These will be explained based on the effects of the strains on the carrier effective masses.