Related papers: Boron: a Hunt for Superhard Polymorphs
Boron is an element of fascinating chemical complexity. Controversies have shrouded this element since its discovery was announced in 1808: the new 'element' turned out to be a compound containing less than 60-70 percent of boron, and it…
The crystal structure of boron is unique among chemical elements, highly complex, and imperfectly known. Experimentalists report the beta-rhombohedral (black) form is stable over all temperatures from absolute zero to melting. However,…
Borophene is a two-dimensional material made out of boron atoms only. It exhibits polymorphism and different allotropes can be studied in terms of a rigid electronic structure, where only the occupation of the states change with the respect…
The complex crystal chemistry of elemental boron has led to numerous proposed structures with distinctive motifs as well as contradictory findings. Herein, evolutionary structure searches performed at 100 GPa have uncovered a series of…
Elementary semiconductors are rare and attractive, especially for low-dimensional materials. Unfortunately, most of boron nanostructures were found to be metallic, despite of their typical semiconducting bulk structure. Herein, we propose a…
Carbon is likely the most fascinating element of the periodic table because of the diversity of its allotropes stemming from its variable (sp, sp2, and sp3) bonding motifs. Exploration of new forms of carbon has been an eternal theme of…
Boron is the fifth element in the periodic table and possesses rich chemistry second only to carbon. A striking feature of boron is that B12 icosahedral cages occur as the building blocks in bulk boron and many boron compounds. This is in…
{\gamma}-B28 is a recently established high-pressure phase of boron. Its structure consists of icosahedral B12 clusters and B2 dumbbells in a NaCl-type arrangement (B2){\delta}+(B12){\delta}- and displays a significant charge transfer…
The recent discovery of borophene, a two-dimensional allotrope of boron, raises many questions about its structure and its chemical and physical properties. Boron has a high chemical affinity to oxygen but little is known about the…
Oganov et al report a discovery of an ionic high-pressure /hitherto unknown phase of boron/. We show that this phase has been known since 1965, and it is a covalent material.
Recent discoveries of supposedly pure alpha-tetragonal boron require to revisit its structure. The system is also interesting with respect to a new type of geometrical frustration in elemental crystals, which was found in beta-rhombohedral…
Boron suboxide B6O, the hardest known oxide, has an R-3m crystal structure ({\alpha}-B6O) that can be described as an oxygen-intercalated structure of {\alpha}-boron, or, equivalently, as a cubic close packing of B12 icosahedra with two…
Boron forms compounds with nearly all metals, with notable exception of copper and other group IB and IIB elements. Here, we report an unexpected discovery of ordered copper boride grown epitaxially on Cu(111) under ultrahigh vacuum.…
Boron nitride (BN) is a material with outstanding technological promise because of its exceptional thermochemical stability, structural, electronic and thermal conductivity properties, and extreme hardness. Yet, the relative thermodynamic…
Boron bulk crystals are marked by exceptional structural complexity and unusual related physical phenomena. Recent reports of hydrogenated $\alpha$-tetragonal and a new $\delta$-orthorhombic boron B$_{52}$ phase have raised many fundamental…
Two-dimensional systems have strengthened their position as one of the key materials for novel applications. Very recently, boron joined the distinguished group of elements that are confirmed to possess 2D allotropes, named borophenes. In…
The comment of Dubrovinskaia et al. is scientifically flawed. The high-pressure form of boron, discovered by Oganov et al., is indeed new and its bonding has a significant ionic character, as demonstrated in Ref. 1.
A family of unusually stable boron cages was identified and examined using first-principles local density functional method. The structure of the fullerenes is similar to that of the B12 icosahedron and consists of six crossing…
The basic known and hypothetic one- and two-element phases of the B-C-N-O system (both superhard phases having diamond and boron structures and precursors to synthesize them) are described. The attention has been given to the structure,…
The binary metal borides provide a promising platform for searching unique materials with superconductivity and super-hardness under high pressure, owing to the distinctive bonding characters of boron. In this work, combined the…