Interlayer locking and atomic-scale friction in commensurate small-diameter boron nitride nanotubes

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

Density functional theory applied to small-diameter boron nitride nanotubes (BNNTs) finds out-of-plane structural buckling in contrast to large-diameter tubes that exhibit faceting. Buckling significantly affects interlayer interactions in commensurate double-walled BNNTs. Energy corrugation amplitudes in relative motions of BNNT walls change up to fourfold, depending on interlayer registry relaxation, in marked contrast to carbon nanotubes. Large differences between relaxed and unrelaxed energy corrugations of BNNTs could yield energy dissipation via the strain-induced anelastic relaxation of interlayer locking (or ``lattice kinks''), which can be exploited for mechanical damping applications.