Can Two-Dimensional Boron Superconduct?

Post date: Oct 13, 2016 3:26:43 PM

Nano Letters features our work on its April 2016 issueTwo-dimensional boron is expected to exhibit various structural polymorphs, all being metallic. Additionally, its small atomic mass suggests strong electron–phonon coupling, which in turn can enable superconducting behavior. In a work that appears this month in the American Chemical Society journal Nano Letters, we report first-principles analysis of electronic structure, phonon spectra, and electron–phonon coupling of selected 2D boron polymorphs and show that the most stable structures predicted to feasibly form on a metal substrate should also exhibit intrinsic phonon-mediated superconductivity, with estimated critical temperature in the range of Tc ≈ 10–20 K.