In their recent study, Ultrathin Boron Growth onto Nanodiamond Surfaces via Electrophilic Boron Precursors, researchers investigated the utility of diamond as a templating substrate for growing ultrathin boron surfaces: relevant to applications in optoelectronics, biological imaging, cancer therapies, and fuel combustion technologies.

The authors of this work sought to investigate whether diamond could be adapted as a templating substrate for nanomaterial thin-film growth. Although it had previously been largely unexplored for this purpose, diamond has several promising features for the synthesis of nanomaterial thin-films, including a large band-gap; thermal conductivity; chemical reactivity; and a lack of cytotoxicity. This last property makes it particularly well-suited for applications in emergent technologies in medicine and quantum sensing.

In this paper, researchers were able to demonstrate templated synthesis of ultrathin Boron on oxidized, high-pressure/high-temperature nanodiamond (NDs) using multiple trigonal Boron compounds (Boron trichloride, Boron tribromide, and Borane). They found that BBr₃ and BCl₃ were highly reactive with the diamond surface, and the resulting sheet-like structures were verified with electron microscopy.

Multiple techniques provided at Covalent were employed in this study:

• Dynamic Light Scattering (DLS) is a particle characterization technique that showed that the Boron-diamond nanostructures were aggregating in dichloromethane and dispersed in various solvents.
• Transmission Electron Microscopy (TEM) is an imaging technique with atomic-scale resolution; it was performed here to visualize chemical and morphological changes in the ND-OH samples after Boron chemistry treatments
  • Energy Dispersive X-ray Spectroscopy (EDS / EDX) is a chemical analysis technique performed on the TEM instrument, and was used to confirm and map the presence of Carbon, Boron, and Oxygen
• X-ray Photoelectron Spectroscopy (XPS) is an ultra-surface-sensitive spectroscopy technique; in this study, it was used to probe for Carbon, Boron, and Oxygen on the surface of the ND-OH and ND-B samples and to quantify the concentration of these elements on the surface. XPS was also able to confirm the presence of B-B, B-O, and B-C bonding environments

This research lays foundational groundwork for future cell-imaging and Boron Neutron Capture Therapy (BNCT) and other prospective applications in cancer treatment.

The unique templating mechanism (based on nucleophilic alcohols and electrophilic trigonal precursors) uncovered in this work will interest materials researchers using diamond for numerous applications, such as quantum sensing, additive manufacturing, BNCT, or for electron emission.