Splitsville for Boron Nitride Nanotubes

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab)
June 28, 2011

For Hollywood celebrities, the term “splitsville” usually means “check your prenup.” For scientists wanting to mass-produce high quality nanoribbons from boron nitride nanotubes, “splitsville” could mean “happily ever after.”

Scientists with the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and the University of California (UC) Berkeley, working with scientists at Rice University, have developed a technique in which boron nitride nanotubes are stuffed with atoms of potassium until the tubes split open along a longitudinal seam. This creates defect-free boron nitride nanoribbons of uniform lengths and thickness. Boron nitride nanoribbons are projected to display a variety of intriguing magnetic and electronic properties that hold enormous potential for future devices.

Nanoribbons are two-dimensional single crystals (meaning only a single atom in thickness) that can measure multiple microns in length, but only a few hundred or less nanometers in width. Graphene nanoribbons, which are made from pure carbon, carry electrons at much faster speeds than silicon, and can be used to cover wide areas and a broad assortment of shapes. Boron nitride nanoribbons offer similar advantages plus an additional array of electronic, optical and magnetic properties.

“There has been a significant amount of theoretical work indicating that, depending on the ribbon edges, boron nitride nanoribbons may exhibit ferromagnetism or anti-ferromagnetism, as well as spin-polarized transport which is either metallic or semi-conducting,” says physicist Alex Zettl, one of the world’s foremost researchers into nanoscale systems and devices who holds joint appointments with Berkeley Lab’s Materials Sciences Division (MSD) and the Physics Department at UC Berkeley, where he is the director of the Center of Integrated Nanomechanical Systems (COINS).
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