Rapid Synthesis of Sub-5 nm Sized Cubic Boron Nitride Nanocrystals with High-Piezoelectric Behavior via Electrochemical Shock

A key challenge in current superhard materials research is the design of novel superhard nanocrystals (NCs) whereby new and unexpected properties may be predicted. Cubic boron nitride (c-BN) is a superhard material which ranks next to diamond; however, downsizing c-BN material below the 10 nm scale is rather challenging, and the interesting new properties of c-BN NCs remain unexplored and wide open. Herein we report an electrochemical shock method to prepare uniform c-BN NCs with a lateral size of only 3.4 ± 0.6 nm and a thickness of only 0.74 ± 0.3 nm at ambient temperature and pressure. The fabrication process is simple and fast, with c-BN NCs produced in just a few minutes. Most interestingly, the NCs exhibit excellent piezoelectric performance with a large recordable piezoelectric coefficient of 25.7 pC/N, which is almost 6 times larger than that from bulk c-BN and even competitive to conventional piezoelectric materials. The phenomenon of enhancement in the piezoelectric properties of BN NCs might ar...