Other Boron-rich Superhard Materials
Other hard boron-rich compounds include B4C and B6O. Amorphous a-B4C has a hardness of about 50 GPa, which is in the range of superhardness. It can be looked at as consisting of boron icosahedra-like crystals embedded in an amorphous medium. However, when studying the crystalline form of B4C, the hardness is only about 30 GPa. This crystalline form has the same stoichiometry as B13C3, which consists of boron icosahedra connected by boron and carbon atoms. Boron suboxide (B6O) has a hardness of about 35 GPa. Its structure contains eight B12 icosahedra units, which are sitting at the vertices of a rhombohedral unit cell. There are two oxygen atoms located along the (111) rhombohedral direction.
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