skip to main content
OSTI.GOV title logo U.S. Department of Energy
Office of Scientific and Technical Information

Title: Bonding, elastic and vibrational properties in low and high pressure synthesized diamond-like BCx phases

Journal Article · · Journal of Physics. Conference Series

Recent studies demonstrate that low pressure chemical vapor deposition at 950 K leads to the synthesis of diamond-like boron carbides with high concentrations of boron (0.66 < x < 4) in which the sp 2 fraction depends on the boron concentration [1]. This indicates that the graphitic BC3 (g-BC3) phases obtained by chemical vapor deposition materials are mixtures of diamond-like and graphitic BCx phases. This finding allows us to revise the interpretation of the x-ray diffraction (XRD) patterns of the g-BC3 phases discussed previously [2, 3]. To support the new interpretation, we conducted a laser heating experiment of the g-BC3 phase. We found that after laser heating at 1100 K and 25 GPa in a diamond anvil cell (DAC) almost all graphitic layers of the g-BC3 transform into a cubic structure. The XRD pattern of the cubic BC3 phase (c-BC3) can be indexed with a cubic unit cell a = 3.619 (0.165) Å. Measurements of the equation of state of the g-BC3 phase demonstrated that boron atoms were incorporated into the graphitic B-C network. The linear compressibility along the c axis can be characterized by the value of the linear modulus Bc = 29.2 ± 1.8 GPa. Linear fitting of the experimental data for the a/a o parameter as a function of pressure gives us the value of the linear elastic modulus along the a axes: Ba = 800 ± 75 GPa.

Research Organization:
Argonne National Lab. (ANL), Argonne, IL (United States). Advanced Photon Source (APS)
Sponsoring Organization:
DOE - BASIC ENERGY SCIENCESNSFDOE-NNSA
OSTI ID:
1409110
Journal Information:
Journal of Physics. Conference Series, Vol. 950, Issue 11, 2017; Conference: Madrid, Spain; ISSN 1742-6588
Publisher:
IOP Publishing
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
ENGLISH