When Sanjukta Mondal first read about a new form of boron that bends like plastic and conducts electricity like metal, she couldn’t believe it. Boron—element number five—has always been the stiff, brittle cousin in the periodic table, useful in nuclear shields and semiconductors but notoriously hard to shape and poor at conducting electricity. Now, a team of scientists has created a form of pure boron called Imma-B60 that defies all expectations.
For decades, boron was stuck in its ways—superhard, fragile, and electrically sluggish. Its wide bandgap, over 1.5 electronvolts (eV), meant it resisted the flow of electricity unless given a big energy boost. Engineers wanted a version that could bend and conduct, but every attempt failed. The atoms just wouldn’t cooperate. Then came a clever workaround: build a scaffold, then remove the supports.
The breakthrough started with a compound called sodium boride, Na4B60. Scientists grew large crystals of it using a trick—adding zinc layers to help the structure grow bigger and more stable. Inside, sodium atoms sat in open channels, surrounded by cages of 12 boron atoms linked by tiny triangular units of three. At 900°C in a vacuum furnace, the sodium atoms were slowly pulled out, leaving behind a pure boron framework: Imma-B60.
What emerged was a material that conducts electricity 10 million times better than ordinary boron. Its bandgap is under 0.2 eV, making it a narrow-gap semiconductor that works at room temperature. Even more surprising, it can flex without breaking. In lab tests, tiny pillars of Imma-B60 were squeezed to 32% of their original length and still held together. High-resolution images showed how layers of atoms slid past each other smoothly when bent, thanks to a dislocation-mediated slip mechanism.
This isn’t just a lab curiosity. Imma-B60 opens the door to new kinds of durable, conductive materials made entirely from boron. Because it’s both tough and electrically active, it could one day be used in flexible electronics, resilient sensors, or even next-generation semiconductors. The method used—building a scaffold and removing the metal—might also work for other stubborn elements, giving scientists a new playbook for designing materials.
For a substance once thought too rigid to reshape, boron just got a whole lot more interesting.