The Rice group built computer simulations to analyse the properties of materials which showed that hexagonal vacancies in borophene help soften the material to facilitate its corrugated form.
"Borophene is metallic in its typical state, with strong electron-phonon coupling to support possible superconductivity, and a rich band structure that contains Dirac cones, as in graphene," said theoretical physicist Boris Yakobson.
The team discovered that borophene needs the underlying structure to make it wavy. When grown on a featureless surface, its natural form resembles graphene. According to Yakobson, borophene prefers to be flat because that's where its energy is lowest. But surprisingly, when grown on silver, borophene adopts its accordion-like form while silver reconstructs itself to match. The corrugation can be retained by ‘re-gluing’ boron onto another substrate.
"This wavy conformation so far seems unique due to the exceptional structural flexibility and particular interactions of borophene with silver, and may be initially triggered by a slight compression in the layer when a few too many boron atoms get onto the surface," commented postdoctoral researcher Zhuhua Zhang.
