A fullerene is a molecule composed entirely of carbon that takes the form of a hollow sphere, ellipsoid, or tube. Buckminsterfullerene (C60) was the first fullerene discovered in 1985 and resembles a soccer ball shape made of 20 hexagons and 12 pentagons. Fullerenes were not well known until their discovery but have since been found to naturally occur, if rarely. They have unique properties that make them subjects of research for applications in materials science, electronics, and nanotechnology.
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A fullerene is a molecule composed entirely of carbon that takes the form of a hollow sphere, ellipsoid, or tube. Buckminsterfullerene (C60) was the first fullerene discovered in 1985 and resembles a soccer ball shape made of 20 hexagons and 12 pentagons. Fullerenes were not well known until their discovery but have since been found to naturally occur, if rarely. They have unique properties that make them subjects of research for applications in materials science, electronics, and nanotechnology.
A fullerene is a molecule composed entirely of carbon that takes the form of a hollow sphere, ellipsoid, or tube. Buckminsterfullerene (C60) was the first fullerene discovered in 1985 and resembles a soccer ball shape made of 20 hexagons and 12 pentagons. Fullerenes were not well known until their discovery but have since been found to naturally occur, if rarely. They have unique properties that make them subjects of research for applications in materials science, electronics, and nanotechnology.
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A fullerene is a molecule composed entirely of carbon that takes the form of a hollow sphere, ellipsoid, or tube. Buckminsterfullerene (C60) was the first fullerene discovered in 1985 and resembles a soccer ball shape made of 20 hexagons and 12 pentagons. Fullerenes were not well known until their discovery but have since been found to naturally occur, if rarely. They have unique properties that make them subjects of research for applications in materials science, electronics, and nanotechnology.
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Fullerene
by Muhammad Nur Syafiq Wong on Saturday, September 4, 2010 at 6:27am
A fullerene is any molecule composed entirely of carbon, in the form
of a hollow sphere, ellipsoid, or tube. Spherical fullerenes are also called buckyballs, and cylindrical ones are called carbon nanotubes or buckytubes. Fullerenes are similar in structure to graphite, which is composed of stacked graphene sheets of linked hexagonal rings; but they may also contain pentagonal (or sometimes heptagonal) rings.
The first fullerene to be discovered, and the family's namesake, was
buckminsterfullerene C60, prepared in 1985 by Harold Kroto, James Heath, Sean O'Brien, Robert Curl and Richard Smalley at Rice University. The name was an homage to Richard Buckminster Fuller, whose geodesic domes it resembles. Fullerenes have since been found to occur (if rarely) in nature[1].
The discovery of fullerenes greatly expanded the number of known
carbon allotropes, which until recently were limited to graphite, diamond, and amorphous carbon such as soot and charcoal. Buckyballs and buckytubes have been the subject of intense research, both for their unique chemistry and for their technological applications, especially in materials science, electronics, and nanotechnology. Prediction and discovery
Icosahedral C60H60 cage was mentioned in 1965 as a possible
topological structure.[2] The existence of C60 was predicted by Eiji Osawa of Toyohashi University of Technology in 1970.[3][4] He noticed that the structure of a corannulene molecule was a subset of a soccer-ball shape, and he hypothesised that a full ball shape could also exist. His idea was reported in Japanese magazines, but did not reach Europe or the Americas.
Also in 1970, R. W.Henson (then of the Atomic Energy Research
Establishment) proposed the structure and made a model of C60. The evidence for this new form of carbon was very weak and was not accepted, even by his colleagues. The results were never published but were acknowledged in Carbon in 1999.[5][6]
With mass spectrometry, discrete peaks were observed corresponding to
molecules with the exact mass of sixty or seventy or more carbon atoms. In 1985, Harold Kroto (then of the University of Sussex), James R. Heath, Sean O'Brien, Robert Curl and Richard Smalley, from Rice University, discovered C60, and shortly thereafter came to discover the fullerenes.[7] Kroto, Curl, and Smalley were awarded the 1996 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their roles in the discovery of this class of compounds. C60 and other fullerenes were later noticed occurring outside the laboratory (e.g., in normal candle soot). By 1991, it was relatively easy to produce gram-sized samples of fullerene powder using the techniques of Donald Huffman and Wolfgang Krätschmer. Fullerene purification remains a challenge to chemists and to a large extent determines fullerene prices. So-called endohedral fullerenes have ions or small molecules incorporated inside the cage atoms. Fullerene is an unusual reactant in many organic reactions such as the Bingel reaction discovered in 1993. The first nanotubes were obtained in 1991.[8]
Minute quantities of the fullerenes, in the form of C60, C70, C76,
and C84 molecules, are produced in nature, hidden in soot and formed by lightning discharges in the atmosphere.[9] In 1992, fullerenes were found in a family of minerals known as Shungites in Karelia, Russia.[1] In 2010, fullerenes have been discovered in space (see Examples in nature).
Nanomaterials
Fullerenes
Carbon nanotubes
Fullerene chemistry
Applications
In popular culture
Timeline
Carbon allotropes
Nanoparticles
Quantum dots
Nanostructures
Colloidal gold
Silver nanoparticles Iron nanoparticles
Platinum nanoparticles
See also Nanotechnology
Naming
Buckminsterfullerene (C60) was named after Richard Buckminster
Fuller, a noted architectural modeler who popularized the geodesic dome. Since buckminsterfullerenes have a similar shape to that sort of dome, the name was thought to be appropriate. As the discovery of the fullerene family came after buckminsterfullerene, the shortened name 'fullerene' was used to refer to the family of fullerenes. The suffix “ene” indicates that each C atom is covalently bonded to three others (instead of the maximum of four), a situation that classically would correspond to the existence of bonds involving two pairs of electrons (“double bonds”).
Variations
Since the discovery of fullerenes in 1985, structural variations on
fullerenes have evolved well beyond the individual clusters themselves. Examples include:[10]
buckyball clusters: smallest member is C20 (unsaturated version
of dodecahedrane) and the most common is C60; nanotubes: hollow tubes of very small dimensions, having single or multiple walls; potential applications in electronics industry; megatubes: larger in diameter than nanotubes and prepared with walls of different thickness; potentially used for the transport of a variety of molecules of different sizes;[11] polymers: chain, two-dimensional and three-dimensional polymers are formed under high pressure high temperature conditions nano"onions": spherical particles based on multiple carbon layers surrounding a buckyball core; proposed for lubricants; [12] linked "ball-and-chain" dimers: two buckyballs linked by a carbon chain;[13] fullerene rings.[14]
"Buckyballs"
C60 with isosurface of ground state electron density as calculated
with DFT
Many association footballs have the same shape as the
Buckminsterfullerene C60
Buckminsterfullerene
Buckminsterfullerene (IUPAC name (C60-Ih)[5,6]fullerene) is the
smallest fullerene molecule in which no two pentagons share an edge (which can be destabilizing, as in pentalene). It is also the most common in terms of natural occurrence, as it can often be found in soot.
The structure of C60 is a truncated (T = 3) icosahedron, which
resembles a soccer ball of the type made of twenty hexagons and twelve pentagons, with a carbon atom at the vertices of each polygon and a bond along each polygon edge.
The van der Waals diameter of a C60 molecule is about 1 nanometer
(nm). The nucleus to nucleus diameter of a C60 molecule is about 0.71 nm.
The C60 molecule has two bond lengths. The 6:6 ring bonds (between two hexagons) can be considered "double bonds" and are shorter than the 6:5 bonds (between a hexagon and a pentagon). Its average bond length is 1.4 angstroms.
Silicon buckyballs have been created around metal ions.
Boron buckyball A new type of buckyball utilizing boron atoms instead of the usual carbon has been predicted and described in 2007. The B80 structure, with each atom forming 5 or 6 bonds, is predicted to be more stable than the C60 buckyball.[15] One reason for this given by the researchers is that the B-80 is actually more like the original geodesic dome structure popularized by Buckminster Fuller which utilizes triangles rather than hexagons. However, this work has been subject to much criticism by quantum chemists[16][17] as it was concluded that the predicted Ih symmetric structure was vibrationally unstable and the resulting cage undergoes a spontaneous symmetry break yielding a puckered cage with rare Th symmetry (symmetry of a volleyball).[16] The number of six atom rings in this molecule is 20 and number of five member rings is 12. There is an additional atom in the center of each six member ring, bonded to each atom surrounding it.
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