The scientific world’s newest 'miracle material' might not actually exist—it might just be a bunch of regular old dust that someone misidentified.
Many scientists thought they had created "borophene," a miracle 2D material. This study shows that the standard methods used to make it actually just produce oxidized junk and carbon, debunking years of supposed breakthroughs.
Debunking Top-Down Borophene: A Multimodal Reassessment of Boron Sonication and Milling
SSRN · 6559458
The rapid rise of publications claiming the synthesis of free-standing borophene via top-down approaches has generated intense excitement, but also deep ambiguity, around the true nature of the resulting materials. Here we demonstrate that, under representative bath-sonication and mechanical milling conditions, no known borophene polymorph is formed. We have compared sonication of boron powder in water, hydrogen peroxide, organic solvents, and ball-milling in controlled gas atmospheres treatment