A New Class of Boron Nanotube

TL;DR

This paper predicts a new class of boron sheets and nanotubes using density functional theory, revealing their stability, electronic properties, and potential for electronic device applications.

Contribution

It introduces a sparser boron sheet structure and characterizes the electronic properties of related nanotubes, including their stability and metallic or semiconducting nature.

Findings

The boron sheet remains flat and metallic.

Only the thin (8, 0) nanotube is semiconducting with a 0.44 eV band gap.

Thicker nanotubes are metallic regardless of chirality.

Abstract

The configurations, stability and electronic structures of a new class of boron sheet and related boron nanotubes are predicted within the framework of density functional theory. This boron sheet is sparser than those of recent proposals. Our theoretic results show that the stable boron sheet remains flat and is metallic. There are bands similar to the p-bands in graphite near the Fermi level. Stable nanotubes with various diameters and chiral vectors can be rolled from the sheet. Within our study, only the thin (8, 0) nanotube with a band gap of 0.44 eV is semiconducting, while all the other thicker boron nanotubes are metallic, independent of their chirality. It indicates the possibility, in the design of nanodevices, to control the electronic transport properties of the boron nanotube through the diameter.