High growth temperatures (>1100 degrees C), low production yield, and impurities have prevented research progress and applications of boron nitride nanotubes (BNNTs) in the past 10 years. Here, we show that BNNTs can be grown on substrates at 600 degrees C. These BNNTs are constructed of high-order tubular structures and can be used without purification. Tunneling spectroscopy indicates that th...

We have exfoliated hexagonal boron nitride by ultrasonication in solutions of polyvinylalcohol in water. The resultant nanosheets are sterically stabilised by adsorbed polymer chains. Centrifugation-based sizeselection was used to give dispersions of nanosheets with aspect ratio (length/thickness) of 1400. Such dispersions can be used to produce polyvinylalcohol–BN composite films. Helium ion m...

A direct and metal layer-free growth of flat graphene pads on exfoliated hexagonal boron nitride substrate (h-BN) are demonstrated by atmospheric chemical vapour deposition (CVD) process. Round shape with high flatness graphene pads are grown in high yield (∼95%) with a pad thickness of ∼0.5 nm and homogenous diameter.

The energetic and electronic properties of acetylenic-bond-interconnected hexagonal boron nitride sheets (BNyne), in which the number of rows of BN hexagonal rings (denoted as BN width) between neighboring arrays of acetylenic linkages increases consecutively, have been explored using first-principles calculations. Depending on the spatial position of B/N atoms with respect to the acetylenic li...

1 Device fabrication details.

We demonstrate that the one-dimensional (1D) transport channels that appear in the gap when graphene nanoroads are embedded in boron nitride (BN) sheets are more robust when they are inserted at AB/BA grain boundaries. Our conclusions are based on ab initio electronic structure calculations for a variety of different crystal orientations and bonding arrangements at the BN/C interfaces. This pro...

Low-dimensional materials differ from their bulk counterparts in many respects. In particular, the screening of the Coulomb interaction is strongly reduced, which can have important consequences such as the significant increase of exciton binding energies. In bulk materials the binding energy is used as an indicator in optical spectra to distinguish different kinds of excitons, but this is not ...

A fundamental building block for nanophotonics is the ability to achieve negative refraction of polaritons, because this could enable the demonstration of many unique nanoscale applications such as deep-subwavelength imaging, superlens, and novel guiding. However, to achieve negative refraction of highly squeezed polaritons, such as plasmon polaritons in graphene and phonon polaritons in boron ...

The study of hexagonal boron nitride (hBN) in microfluidic and nanofluidic applications at the atomic level requires accurate force field parameters to describe the water-hBN interaction. In this work, we begin with benchmark quality first principles quantum Monte Carlo calculations on the interaction energy between water and hBN, which are used to validate random phase approximation (RPA) calc...