Publication date: 15th December 2025
Metal borides constitute a broad and technologically significant class of materials defined by their exceptional hardness, thermal stability, electronic tunability, and chemical robustness. These properties make boron-rich compounds—from transition-metal borides such as Ni₃B to rare-earth hexaborides (MB₆)—highly attractive for applications in catalysis, energy storage, heat management, and extreme-environment coatings. Yet, synthesizing metal borides with precise control across multiple length scales remains a key challenge, limiting their wider implementation in functional devices and engineered architectures.
In this work, we establish general strategies to design and process metal borides from the nanoscale to the macroscale. At the nanoscale, we use low-temperature borothermal synthesis to obtain phase-pure Ni₃B and MB₆ (M = Sr, Ca, Ba, La, Ce) nanocrystals with controlled size, crystallinity, and surface chemistry. These nanocrystals can be rendered colloidally stable through tailored inorganic and organic ligand treatments, enabling their dispersion in polar and non-polar solvents and their integration into thin films, composites, and catalytic systems. Advanced electron microscopy and solid-state ¹¹B NMR confirm the formation of crystalline boride cores with surface BₓOᵧ shells, providing insight into boron coordination, stability, and reactivity.
At the macroscale, we demonstrate boron incorporation into 3D metallic architectures by boriding commercial Ni foam. This process forms a conformal nickel-boride layer throughout the porous network, dramatically improving thermal robustness, oxidation resistance, and mechanical performance. The resulting borided foams highlight how boron diffusion can reinforce lightweight metallic scaffolds, complementing the nanoscale functionalities offered by discrete boride nanocrystals.
Together, these approaches present a unified framework for the scalable synthesis, surface engineering, and structural design of metal borides. By bridging nanocrystal chemistry with bulk boriding processes, this work expands the accessible design space for boron-rich materials and opens pathways toward their deployment in high-temperature catalysis, protective coatings, plasmonic and optical devices, energy-storage electrodes, and mechanically resilient porous structures.
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