Stacking and freestanding borophene for lithium-ion battery application

Abstract

The growth of artificial synthesis two-dimensional (2D) materials usually demands for suitable substrate due to their rare bulk allotropies. Borophene, as a typical artificial synthetic material, has been proved its substrate-growth on metal or nonmetals and its high theoretical specific capacity (1720 mAh g−1) for next-genatration electrode material, but structural instability and transfer difficulties have hindered the development of its applications. Here, a structurally stable and freestanding AA-stacked-α′-4H-borophene sheets have been synthesized by in situ lithium eutectic salt-assisted synthetic method to realize the application of borophene in lithium-ion battery. The atomic structure of AA-α′-4H-borophene with interlayer VdWs was established by comparing the experimental observation with DFT optimal calculation. Different stacking configurations (AA- and AB-) of borophene was realized by a temperature-structure-photoluminescence intensity relationship, and the AA-stacked borophene exhibits higher specific capacity than AB structure. Based on electrochemical performance, the AA-borophene exhibits excellent rate capability and cycling performance due to its non-collapsible stacking configurations, which dominates great initial coulombic efficiency of 87.3% at 200 mA g−1 superior to that of black phosphorus-based and borophene/graphene. Meanwhile, it still maintains the coulombic efficiency of 99.13% after 1000 cycles. It also shows a reversible capacity of 181 mAh g−1 at 10 mA g−1 between the voltage window of 0.01 and 2 V, which improves the reported capacity (43 mAh g−1) of bulk boron anode by over 430%. This work brings fantastic new view of fabricating stable, stacking and freestanding borophene and provides a significative idea on applications of borophene in energy storage domain.