Impressive borophene properties predicted

Abstract

A computational study has predicted a new 2-D boron material with impressive electronic and physical properties (J. Am. Chem. Soc. 2019, DOI: 10.1021/jacs.8b13075). Chemists first predicted borophenes—the boron equivalent of graphene—in the 1990s, but the materials weren’t synthesized until 2015. Borophenes share graphene’s sought-after mechanical and electronic properties, and boron’s lower mass makes them lighter. But boron can’t form stable honeycomb structures the way carbon can in graphene. Li-Ming Yang of Huazhong University of Science and Technology and colleagues predict a new material composed of sheets of borophene sandwiching a layer of tetracoordinate aluminum atoms to stabilize the boron honeycombs. The team’s calculations suggest that this three-layer material would be stiffer than single-layer graphene and would remain stable when heated to nearly 2,100 K. And the researchers say their borophene could be a superconductor at 4.7 K and as high as 30 K when the structure is strained. Such superconducting