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Fullerenes: An Overview 

Peter Unwin Fullerenes (An Overview) Introduction The 1996 Nobel Prize for Chemistry has been won by Harold W. Kroto, Robert F. Curl and Richard E. Smalley ... for their discovery in 1985 of a new allotrope of carbon, in which the atoms are arranged in closed shells. The new form was found to have the structure of a truncated icosahedron, and was named Buckminsterfullerene, after the architect Buckminster Fuller who designed geodesic domes in the 1960's. Formerly, six crystalline forms of the element carbon were known, namely two kinds of graphite, two kinds of diamond, chaoit and carbon(VI). The latter two were discovered in 1968 and 1972. In 1990 physicists W. Krätschmer and D.R. Huffman for the first time produced isolable quantities of C60 by causing an arc between two graphite rods to burn in a helium atmosphere and extracting the carbon condensate so formed using an organic solvent. The way was thus open for studying the chemical properties of C60 and other carbon clusters such as C7   [More...] [Less...]