Exotic Properties of Alloys of Carbon and Boron Nitride

Considerable effort has been made to alloy graphene and boron nitride because of the potential to continuously tune the band gap over a large range. The tendency for the two materials to phase segregate has hampered such efforts. Another possibility is to make the alloy such that the carbon only sits on the B or the N sublattice. The resulting structures are not guaranteed to have a band gap due to the imbalance of boron and nitrogen atoms. Using first principles density functional calculations, we show the that such systems are host to interesting physics and deserve attention. Magnetic, excitonic, and topological properties of the resulting structures are discussed.