Structure and Fundamental Properties of Black Phosphorus

Abstract

Black phosphorus (BP) is one of the most stable allotropes among the three allotropes of phosphorus at a high temperature under a high pressure possessing new two-dimensional layered structure, which was first prepared by Bridgman in 1914. Since, the development and recent success in growing two-dimensional material family, single- or few-layered, BP has recently a vital field of interest due to their various superior properties, such as a tunable and direct/narrow band gaps, high carrier mobility, large specific surface area, photothermal property, biocompatibility, biodegradability and many interesting in-layer anisotropies and attracted considerable attention on applications in energy conversion and storage, oxygen evolution, electronics, optoelectronics, photocatalytic hydrogenation, water splitting, and thermoelectric generators, etc. Especially, there emerge contributions on electrochemical energy storage devices as supercapacitors and in batteries like lithium/sodium ion batteries. This chapter summarizes the structure and fundamental properties and few preparation methods of BP.