Synthesis, Atomic Structures and Properties of Boron Nitride Nanotubes

Abstract

Since the development of boron nitride (BN) nanotubes (Chopra et al. 1995), various types of BN nanostructured materials have been reported because of the great potential for using materials with low dimensions in an isolated environment. Many studies have been reported on BN nanomaterials and single crystals such as nanotubes (Golberg et al. 2000, Mickelson et al. 2003), bundled tubes, nanocorns, nanohorns, nanocapsules, nanoparticles, BN clusters, and BN metallofullerenes, which are expected to be useful as electronic devices, field-effect transistors (Radosavljevi et al. 2003), high heat-resistant semiconductors, insulator lubricants, nanowires (Tang et al. 2002), magnetic nanoparticles, gas storage materials (Lim et al. 2007), and optoelectronic applications including ultraviolet light emitters. Theoretical calculations on BN nanomaterials such as nanotubes (Rubio et al. 1994), cluster-included nanotubes, BN clusters, BN metallofullerenes, cluster solids, nanohorns, and hydrogen storage have also been carried out for prediction of the properties. By controlling the size, layer numbers, helicity, compositions, and included clusters, these cluster-included BN nanocage structures with bandgap energy of ~6 eV (Watanabe et al. 2004) and nonmagnetism are expected to show various electronic, optical, and magnetic properties as shown in Fig. 1. The differences between BN and carbon nanomaterials (Oku et al. 2009) are summarized as shown in Table 1.