Boron-doped silicon carbide (SiC) thin film on silicon (Si): a novel electrode material for supercapacitor application Kusumita Kundu 1,2 , Arnab Ghosh 3 , Apurba Ray 4 , Sachindranath Das 4 , Joy Chakraborty 5 , Suresh Kumar 5 , Namburi E. Prasad 5 , and Rajat Banerjee 1,2, * 1 CSIR-Central Glass and Ceramic Research Institute, Council of Scientific & Industrial Research, Govt. of India, 196, Raja S.C. Mullick Road, Jadavpur, Kolkata 700032, India 2 Academy of Scientific and Innovative Research (AcSIR), Ghaziabad 201002, India 3 SN Bose National Centre for Basic Sciences, Kolkata 700106, India 4 Department of Instrumentation Science, Jadavpur University, Jadavpur, Kolkata 700032, India 5 Defence Materials and Stores Research and Development Establishment, GT Road, Kanpur 208 013, India Received: 30 June 2020 Accepted: 25 August 2020 Ó Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020 ABSTRACT In this work, we report the synthesis of silicon carbide (SiC) thin film on silicon by modified chemical vapour deposition technique using boron-doped liquid polycarbosilane as a precursor. Subsequent microscopic and physical charac- terizations of this film show the presence of SiC nanocrystal along with boron in the SiC thin film. The electrochemical characterizations of the film shows a highest capacitance of 232F/g at 2.2A/g current density from Galvanostatic charging–discharging method with good cyclic stability upto 2000 cycles. The high capacitance value is attributed to the surface defect states and amorphous carbon which acts as the charge active sites. The result further infers that the (B)SiC/Si is a promising electrode material for high-performance energy storage application. 1 Introduction In the last couple of years, the energy sector has focused on the usage of several alternative energy resources including developments of supercapacitors (SCs) which seem to have a very promising future because of their high storage capacities [1–3]. Super- capacitors (SC) have a great advantage over batteries as SCs can store charge electrostatically on the surface and it can be charged very quickly, leading to high power density [4–6]. However, the properties of the active material used for the fabrication of the elec- trode play a very prominent role on the performance of supercapacitors. There are two kinds of superca- pacitor based on the charge storage mechanism i.e. electric double-layer capacitor (EDLC) and pseudo- capacitor. EDLC stores the charge electrostatically at Address correspondence to E-mail: rajatbanerjee@hotmail.com https://doi.org/10.1007/s10854-020-04346-y J Mater Sci: Mater Electron