Fullerene

On my commute to work today, I had the misfortune of being crammed into a narrow tube underground. But it could have been worse: I could’ve been squished into a single dimension. Alex Winter on His Character in Destroy All Neighbors That’s what recently happened to some krypton atoms in an Ulm University chemistry lab. Using transmission electron microscopy (or TEM), a team managed to squeeze the noble gas into a nanotube with a diameter 1/500,000th that of a human hair. In such a confined space, the atoms could not…

Even without the symmetry and curvature of fullerenes, the designed flat fullerene fragments which maintained the pentagonal substructure displayed the same electron accepting properties as fullerenes. Credit: YAP Co., Ltd Fragments of spherical ‘Buckyball’ molecules have stable electron-accepting ability with great practical potential.Researchers at Kyoto University in Japan have gained new insights into the unique chemical properties of spherical molecules composed entirely of carbon atoms, called fullerenes. They did…

Illustration of the structure of monolayer polymeric C60. Credit: Ella Maru StudioSynthetic carbon allotropes are intriguing due to their exceptional properties and potential applications. Scientists have devoted decades to synthesizing new types of carbon materials. However, a two-dimensional fullerene, which possesses a unique structure, has not been successfully synthesized until now.Recently, scientists developed a new interlayer bonding cleavage strategy to prepare a two-dimensional monolayer polymeric fullerene. The…