One approach has been to dope it with compounds like silicon carbide or boron nitride that have matching crystalline lattice structures.
But because boron has one less electron than carbon does, how the element arranges itself into a cage, if indeed it could, would also be different.
To confirm this and figure out its structure, the team measured how tightly the boron clusters they had made held on to electrons.
That means the electronic applications seem likely to go to boron nitride and other non-carbon tubes with similar properties.NanostepsAs to which building blocks will form the complex structures of the future, Dr Theis says this is the subject of continuing research.
"It actually occurred to me on an aeroplane that I could do this with boron and nitrogen".
By introducing boron into the silicon, they made the cantilever into a piezoresistive sensor that is, a sensor that responds to deformation by changing its resistance to the flow of electric current.The final step was to coax the artificial cilia into standing perpendicular to the surface of the wafer.
In Japan, a compound of magnesium and boron that has been lying around on chemists' shelves for decades turns out to be a superconductor with practical potential.
His group is trying to make nano-electrical components, and has built transistors based on tubes made of boron nitride.This material, he says, has the advantage that its nanotubes are semiconductors regardless of their size and shape.
These rods, made of neutron-absorbing materials such as boron, mop up excess neutrons and quench the chain reaction.However, there are other nuclear reactions in a core that do not depend on neutrons.
But from early on, some suggested that a "buckyball" could also be made with only the element boron, and chemists have tried to figure out what this might look like and how to make it in the lab.Like carbon, boron atoms can make strong, stable bonds among themselves.
Dr Wang and the team used the same idea with boron, which they predicted would make 40-atom fullerenes.
