Erbium hexaboride (ErB₆) is a rare-earth hexaboride compound containing the element

erbium Erbium is a chemical element; it has Symbol (chemistry), symbol Er and atomic number 68. A silvery-white solid metal when artificially isolated, natural erbium is always found in chemical combination with other elements. It is a lanthanide, a rare- ...

, which has a calcium hexaboride

crystal structure In crystallography, crystal structure is a description of ordered arrangement of atoms, ions, or molecules in a crystalline material. Ordered structures occur from intrinsic nature of constituent particles to form symmetric patterns that repeat ...

. It is one of the fundamental compounds formed in reactions between erbium and

boron Boron is a chemical element; it has symbol B and atomic number 5. In its crystalline form it is a brittle, dark, lustrous metalloid; in its amorphous form it is a brown powder. As the lightest element of the boron group it has three ...

. The compound is

isostructural Isostructural chemical compounds have similar chemical structures. " Isomorphous" when used in the relation to crystal structures is not synonymous: in addition to the same atomic connectivity that characterises isostructural compounds, isomorphous ...

with all other reported rare-earth hexaboride compounds including lanthanum hexaboride, samarium hexaboride, and cerium hexaboride. Due to the isostructural nature of the rare-earth hexaborides and the strong interaction of boron octahedra within the crystal, these compounds show a high degree of lattice matching which suggests the possibility of doping by substituting one rare earth metal within the crystal with another. Until recently, it had been hypothesized that erbium hexaboride was unstable due to the small size of the Er³⁺ cation within the crystal structure when compared to the ionic radii of other

rare-earth element The rare-earth elements (REE), also called the rare-earth metals or rare earths, and sometimes the lanthanides or lanthanoids (although scandium and yttrium, which do not belong to this series, are usually included as rare earths), are a set o ...

s that form known rare-earth hexaboride compounds. It has now been demonstrated, however, that new nanoscale synthetic methods are capable of producing high-purity, stable erbium hexaboride

nanowire file:SnSe@SWCNT.jpg, upright=1.2, Crystalline 2×2-atom tin selenide nanowire grown inside a single-wall carbon nanotube (tube diameter ≈1 nm). A nanowire is a nanostructure in the form of a wire with the diameter of the order of a nanometre ( ...

s. These wires, produced using

chemical vapor deposition Chemical vapor deposition (CVD) is a vacuum deposition method used to produce high-quality, and high-performance, solid materials. The process is often used in the semiconductor industry to produce thin films. In typical CVD, the wafer (electro ...

(CVD), have a reported lattice constant of 4.1 Å.

References

Erbium compounds Borides {{Inorganic-compound-stub