Abstract
Recently, it was reported that -rhombohedral boron has a negative defect formation energy, which explains the presence of a macroscopic amount of intrinsic defects. In this work, it is shown that the defects in boron have geometrical frustration described by an antiferromagnetic Ising model on an expanded kagome lattice, which is responsible for the reported macroscopic residual entropy. We suggest that the reported anomalies in the transport properties of -boron are due to the hopping of boron atoms between nearly degenerate configurations.
- Received 9 November 2009
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevB.81.020102
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