Boron can form a purely honeycomb, graphene-like 2-D structure

Borophene is known to have triangular lattice with holes, while a honeycomb lattice of boron was predicted to be energetically unstable. However, a research team led by Prof. K. H. Wu at Institute of Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, successfully fabricated a pure graphene-like borophene by using an Al(111) surface as the substrate and molecular beam epitaxy in ultrahigh vacuum, providing an ideal platform for artificial boron-based materials with intriguing electronic properties such as Dirac states and superconductivity behavior.