Fabrication of an ideal nanoring from a black phosphorus nanoribbon upon movable bundling carbon nanotubes

As a low dimensional material, black phosphorus (BP) continues to attract much attention from researchers due to its excellent electric properties. In particular, the one-dimensional material, in the form of a ring or tube formed from BP, has been extensively studied and found to be a perfect semiconductor. But the BP ring has never been reported in laboratories. To form an ideal ring from a rectangular BP ribbon, we choose a carbon nanotube (CNT) bundle to attract the ribbon and move one or more CNTs in the bundle to induce the unsaturated ends of the BP ribbon to become covalently bonded. Numerical experiments are applied to BP ribbons with lengths either equal to, shorter, or longer than the perimeter of the CNT bundle, to investigate the formation of a BP ring. Experiments show that if one end of the BP ribbon is attracted by a CNT, moving the other CNTs away endows the ribbon with high probability of forming an ideal ring. The conclusions drawn from these results will benefit future in situ experiments involving forming a ring from a BP ribbon.