Boron Based Nanostructured Materials
Alex Quandt*, a, Ihsan Boustanib, Amy Liua
aDepartment of Physics, Georgetown University,
Washington, DC 20057 USA
bInstitut f. Physikalische Chemie
Universitaet Wuerzburg,
97074 Wuerzburg GERMANY
This is an abstract
for a presentation given at the
Eighth
Foresight Conference on Molecular Nanotechnology.
There will be a link from here to the full article when it is
available on the web.
Extensive theoretical studies on small and medium sized boron clusters lead us to the conclusion that boron has a strong potential to form stable nanotubular structures 1 . In addition, recent experimental results by Terrones et al. 2 showed that carbon nanotubes doped with boron atoms tend to concentrate the latter mostly in the form of clusters associated with their tips. Therefore a better understanding of nanotubular boron systems could eventually pay off with respect to the development of future nanotechnologies based on carbon nanotubes.
A careful analysis of the structure and formation of boron clusters shows that boron nanotubes follow precisely the same well-defined set of rules that guides the formation of stable boron compounds. Analogous to carbon, boron nanotubes can be related to stable planar boron compounds by a simple geometrical cut and paste operation. It is particularly interesting to compare the resulting planar and layered forms of boron to well-known layered boron-aluminum compounds.
The most important physical properties that characterize a given material are certainly its mechanical and electronic properties. Under this aspect, we will contrast a number of simple nanotubular boron systems with their carbon and boron-nitrogen based counterparts. A key feature that follows from our numerical simulations is the fact that the strain energy of boron nanotubes turns out to be lower than that of carbon. Also we find that boron nanotubes should be metallic. We hope that these results will stimulate research on boron compounds as a promising basic material for nanotechnology.
References
1 I. Boustani, A. Quandt, E. Hernandez and A. Rubio, J. Chem. Phys. 110, 3176 (1999).
The printed version of this paper can be downloaded from
http://www.physics.georgetown.edu/~quandt.
2 M. Terrones, W.K. Hsu, A. Schilder, H. Terrones, N. Grobert, J.P. Hare, W.Q. Zhu, M. Schwoerer,
K. Prassides, H.W. Kroto and D.R.M. Walton, Appl. Phys. A 66, 307 (1998).
*Corresponding Address:
Alex Quandt
Department of Physics, Georgetown University
556 Reiss Science Building
Washington, DC 20057 USA
Email: [email protected]
Web: http://www.physics.georgetown.edu/~quandt
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