Materials discovery at high pressures

L Zhang, Y Wang, J Lv, Y Ma - Nature Reviews Materials, 2017 - nature.com
Pressure is a fundamental thermodynamic variable that can be used to control the properties
of materials, because it reduces interatomic distances and profoundly modifies electronic …

Microscopic theory of hardness and design of novel superhard crystals

Y Tian, B Xu, Z Zhao - International Journal of Refractory Metals and Hard …, 2012 - Elsevier
Hardness can be defined microscopically as the combined resistance of chemical bonds in
a material to indentation. The current review presents three most popular microscopic …

Ultrahard nanotwinned cubic boron nitride

Y Tian, B Xu, D Yu, Y Ma, Y Wang, Y Jiang, W Hu… - Nature, 2013 - nature.com
Cubic boron nitride (cBN) is a well known superhard material that has a wide range of
industrial applications. Nanostructuring of cBN is an effective way to improve its hardness by …

Advancements in the search for superhard ultra‐incompressible metal borides

JB Levine, SH Tolbert, RB Kaner - Advanced Functional …, 2009 - Wiley Online Library
Dense transition metal borides have recently been identified as superhard materials that
offer the possibility of ambient pressure synthesis compared to the conventional high …

High-pressure studies with x-rays using diamond anvil cells

G Shen, HK Mao - Reports on progress in Physics, 2016 - iopscience.iop.org
Pressure profoundly alters all states of matter. The symbiotic development of ultrahigh-
pressure diamond anvil cells, to compress samples to sustainable multi-megabar pressures; …

Harder than diamond: superior indentation strength of wurtzite BN and lonsdaleite

Z Pan, H Sun, Y Zhang, C Chen - Physical review letters, 2009 - APS
Recent indentation experiments indicate that wurtzite BN (w-BN) exhibits surprisingly high
hardness that rivals that of diamond. Here we unveil a novel two-stage shear deformation …

Effective mechanical properties of hexagonal boron nitride nanosheets

L Boldrin, F Scarpa, R Chowdhury, S Adhikari - Nanotechnology, 2011 - iopscience.iop.org
We propose an analytical formulation to extract from energy equivalence principles the
equivalent thickness and in-plane mechanical properties (tensile and shear rigidity, and …

Creation of nanostuctures by extreme conditions: high-pressure synthesis of ultrahard nanocrystalline cubic boron nitride.

VL Solozhenko, OO Kurakevych… - … (Deerfield Beach, Fla.), 2012 - europepmc.org
The synthesis of high-purity bulk nanostructured cubic boron nitride (cBN) at 20 GPa and
1770 K by direct phase transformation of graphite-like BN with an" ideal random layer" …

Recent development of boron nitride towards electronic applications

N Izyumskaya, DO Demchenko, S Das… - Advanced Electronic …, 2017 - Wiley Online Library
Boron nitride occurs in several polymorphs, among which cubic and hexagonal varieties
have been extensively studied over many years and have found numerous practical …

Recent search for new superhard materials: Go nano!

S Veprek - Journal of Vacuum Science & Technology A, 2013 - pubs.aip.org
High elastic moduli do not guarantee high hardness because upon finite shear electronic
instabilities often occur that result in transformation to softer phases. Therefore, the author …