Boron carbon nitride

2Dto3D offers boron carbon nitride, a new 2D material, to laboratories and industries to create new devices and improve their products.

Boron carbon nitride is a 2D material with a several potential applications with are a complement to those offered by boron nitride and polymeric carbon nitride, such as:

• Photocatalyst to oxidize contaminants and colorants
• Photocatalyst to produce hydrogen from water
• Transparent photovoltaic cells (for buildings and cars)
• UV-absorber
• Catalyst to specific organic reactions
• Organic semiconductor to optoelectronics
• Fire retardant
• Phosphor to lighting applications and electronic screens
• Fluorescent material

Boron carbon nitride (BCN) is a layered material with a structure similar to graphite and an interplanar distance of 0.349 nm, in which boron and nitrogen occupy the same positions of carbon.

BCN can be imagined as an intermediate material between graphite and boron nitride, and can been obtained in nanosheets exhibiting interesting properties.

For example, BCN is an organic semiconductor with a tunable band gap energy Eg between 1 to 5 eV depending on the content of both nitrogen and carbon.

As a consequence of these tunable Eg, BCN exhibits also a tunable photoluminescence that makes it interesting to be used to obtain quantum dots and quantum dots light emitter diods (QDLED).

The following image shows the luminescence of a suspension of BCNO.

In semiconductors, light absorption generally leads to an electron being excited from the valence to the conduction band, leaving behind a hole.

The electron and the hole can bind to each other to form an exciton. When this exciton recombines (i.e. the electron resumes its ground state), the exciton energy can be emitted as light.

This is called fluorescence.