Also called h-BN, white graphene
The field’s standard substrate and encapsulant. Boron nitride looks almost exactly like graphene but is an excellent electrical insulator – atomically flat and chemically inert. Sandwiching other 2D materials between hBN layers is the single most important technique for getting clean results, and certain defects in hBN emit single particles of light at room temperature.
Three layers of hexagonal boron nitride in its usual AA′ stacking. The hexagons sit directly over one another, but each layer is turned by 180°, so boron sits over nitrogen and nitrogen over boron. Layers 3.33 Å apart, c = 6.66 Å. Cell from Wyckoff, Crystal Structures 1 (1963); COD 9008997.
Readiness runs lab → prototype → pilot → deployed.
Short notes for specialists. Choose a lens in the header and yours comes first.
A wide-gap, strongly excitonic insulator: GW–BSE is needed for the optical spectrum and for the indirect gap with phonon-assisted luminescence. Identifying emitter defects (carbon complexes, V_B− and others) requires hybrid-functional or embedding calculations of zero-phonon lines and Huang–Rhys factors. Its anisotropic dielectric screening is an essential input when modelling any encapsulated device.
For encapsulation pick flakes 10–30 nm thick and check them for bubbles and steps by dark-field microscopy and AFM. Contrast on SiO2 is weak; the E2g Raman mode near 1,366 cm−1 grows in intensity with layer number. The crystal source matters: carbon and oxygen impurity levels vary between growers and show up as defect emission.
The field’s dependence on a handful of crystal growers is a supply-chain risk. For industry the questions are wafer-scale growth at acceptable temperatures, dielectric reliability (leakage and breakdown statistics), and replacing hand-stacked encapsulation with deposited layers.
The newest items tagged hBN, from the news feed updated 5 Oct 2026.
A central goal of the emerging field of materials QED is to harness subwavelength electromagnetic confinement in engineered cavities to tailor light-matter interactions. Here, we demonstrate that van der Waals multilayer cavities composed of stacked graphene and hexagonal boron nitride (hBN) provide unprecedented…
Optical polarization is a key degree of freedom in quantum photonic and sensing technologies, enabling efficient light--matter coupling and directional emission. However, in defect ensemble-based quantum systems, orientational averaging across many defects suppresses optical anisotropy and eliminates a deterministic…
Multifunctional solid-state materials are crucial for enabling safer and simpler lithium battery architectures. Here we report a scalable, solvent-free mechanochemical strategy to overcome the chemical inertness of hexagonal boron nitride and produce Li2(BN)6C2O4 (LBNCO), a lithium-rich boron nitride nanostructure.…
We numerically study exciton-photon coupling in a hybrid structure composed of a period-doubled Si3N4 photonic crystal slab and an hBN-encapsulated MoSe2 monolayer. Period doubling folds quasi-guided modes into the light cone and produces spectrally separated photonic branches whose radiative character is controlled by…
All 116 items tagged hBN in the news feed · RSS feed for hBN