In 2004 Corso et al. from Osterwalder's group at the University of Zurich, Switzerland, published the discovery of a new inorganic nanostructured two dimensional material, called nanomesh [Science 303, 217 (2004)].

The boron nitride nanomesh is composed of single sheet of hexagonal boron nitride (h-BN) with a honeycomb structure. This sheet corrugates into a highly regular mesh during a high-temperature exposure of the clean rhodium to borazine. The nanomesh consists of a 3 nm unit cell with "pores" and "wires". The pores are regions with a close contact between the BN and rhodium while the wires are lifted by about 0.1 nm.

The nanomesh forms in a self-assembly process, i.e. the organisation of the atoms is driven by the Nature itself without any human intervention. The super-structure forms due to close but different periodicities (lattice constants) of the h-BN nanomesh and the Rh substrate and a site-dependent BN-Rh bond energy.

The boron nitride nanomesh is stable in air, vacuum and liquids. In vacuum it does not decompose up to temperatures of at least 796^oC (1070 K). The BN nanomesh can serve as a template to assemble molecules and clusters. These characteristics promise interesting applications in areas like nanocatalysis, surface functionalisation, spintronics and quantum computing.