Arsenic based hexagonal building motifs for inorganic nanomaterials

The possibility of As containing various group 13 elements, viz., B, Al and Ga, in the form of hexagonal units and their higher order derivatives, as the building blocks for novel semiconductor materials is investigated in detail under the density functional framework. A series of fifteen clusters, formed by a linear combination of hydrogen saturated hexagonal motifs up to five units, (MAs)2n+1H2n+4 (M=B, Al, Ga; n=1–5) are considered to look into their different physicochemical properties and possible applications. It is come out that a combination of arsenic and group 13 elements provides promising building blocks for designing novel semiconductor materials, in the planar hexagonal form.