Reply to Comment on ‘Molecular structure-dependent deformations in boron nitride nanostructures subject to an electrical field’.

A large scattering of effective atomic charge distribution was found in the literature for hexagonal boron nitride nanostructures (BNNSs). In our paper (Zhang J, Wang C Y and Sondipon A 2013 J. Phys. D: Appl. Phys. 46 235303) ‘±3e’ was chosen as a rough approximation for the effective atomic charge in BNNSs as it gave the piezoelectric coefficient of BNNSs close to the values in the literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]