Effective mechanical properties of hexagonal boron nitride nanosheets.

We propose an analytical formulation to extract from energy equivalence principles the equivalent thickness and in-plane mechanical properties (tensile and shear rigidity, and Poisson's ratio) of hexagonal boron nitride (h-BN) nanosheets. The model developed provides not only very good agreement with existing data available in the open literature from experimental, density functional theory (DFT) and molecular dynamics (MD) simulations, but also highlights the specific deformation mechanisms existing in boron nitride sheets, and their difference with carbon-based graphitic systems.