Carbon is a chemical element with the symbol C and atomic number 6. It is nonmetallic and tetravalent—making four electrons available to form covalent chemical bonds. It belongs to group 14 of the periodic table. Carbon makes up only about 0.025 percent of Earth's crust. Three isotopes occur naturally, 12C and 13C being stable, while 14C is a radionuclide, decaying with a half-life of about 5,730 years. Carbon is one of the few elements known since antiquity.
A fullerene is an allotrope of carbon whose molecule consists of carbon atoms connected by single and double bonds so as to form a closed or partially closed mesh, with fused rings of five to seven atoms. The molecule may be a hollow sphere, ellipsoid, tube, or many other shapes and sizes. Graphene, which is a flat mesh of regular hexagonal rings, can be seen as an extreme member of the family.
Sir Harold Walter Kroto, known as Harry Kroto, was an English chemist. He shared the 1996 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Robert Curl and Richard Smalley for their discovery of fullerenes. He was the recipient of many other honors and awards.
Richard Errett Smalley was the Gene and Norman Hackerman Professor of Chemistry and a Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Rice University. In 1996, along with Robert Curl, also a professor of chemistry at Rice, and Harold Kroto, a professor at the University of Sussex, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the discovery of a new form of carbon, buckminsterfullerene, also known as buckyballs. He was an advocate of nanotechnology and its applications.
Robert Floyd Curl Jr. is an American University Professor Emeritus, Pitzer–Schlumberger Professor of Natural Sciences Emeritus, and Professor of Chemistry Emeritus at Rice University. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1996 for the discovery of the nanomaterial buckminsterfullerene, along with Richard Smalley and Harold Kroto of the University of Sussex.
Buckminsterfullerene is a type of fullerene with the formula C60. It has a cage-like fused-ring structure (truncated icosahedron) that resembles a soccer ball, made of twenty hexagons and twelve pentagons. Each carbon atom has three bonds. It is a black solid that dissolves in hydrocarbon solvents to produce a violet solution. The compound has received intense study, although few real world applications have been found.
Carbon is capable of forming many allotropes due to its valency. Well-known forms of carbon include diamond and graphite. In recent decades, many more allotropes have been discovered and researched, including ball shapes such as buckminsterfullerene and sheets such as graphene. Larger-scale structures of carbon include nanotubes, nanobuds and nanoribbons. Other unusual forms of carbon exist at very high temperatures or extreme pressures. Around 500 hypothetical 3‑periodic allotropes of carbon are known at the present time, according to the Samara Carbon Allotrope Database (SACADA).
In chemistry, delocalized electrons are electrons in a molecule, ion or solid metal that are not associated with a single atom or a covalent bond. Term delocalization is general and can have slightly different meanings in different fields. In organic chemistry, this refers to resonance in conjugated systems and aromatic compounds. In solid-state physics, this refers to free electrons that facilitate electrical conduction. In quantum chemistry, this refers to molecular orbital electrons that have extended over several adjacent atoms.
A Platonic hydrocarbon is a hydrocarbon (molecule) whose structure matches one of the five Platonic solids, with carbon atoms replacing its vertices, carbon–carbon bonds replacing its edges, and hydrogen atoms as needed.
In chemistry, an atom cluster is an ensemble of bound atoms or molecules that is intermediate in size between a simple molecule and a nanoparticle; that is, up to a few nanometers (nm) in diameter. The term microcluster may be used for ensembles with up to couple dozen atoms.
Endohedral fullerenes, also called endofullerenes, are fullerenes that have additional atoms, ions, or clusters enclosed within their inner spheres. The first lanthanum C60 complex was synthesized in 1985 and called La@C60. The @ (at sign) in the name reflects the notion of a small molecule trapped inside a shell. Two types of endohedral complexes exist: endohedral metallofullerenes and non-metal doped fullerenes.
Fullerene chemistry is a field of organic chemistry devoted to the chemical properties of fullerenes. Research in this field is driven by the need to functionalize fullerenes and tune their properties. For example, fullerene is notoriously insoluble and adding a suitable group can enhance solubility. By adding a polymerizable group, a fullerene polymer can be obtained. Functionalized fullerenes are divided into two classes: exohedral fullerenes with substituents outside the cage and endohedral fullerenes with trapped molecules inside the cage.
James R. Heath is an American chemist and the president and professor of Institute of Systems Biology. Previous to this, he was the Elizabeth W. Gilloon Professor of Chemistry at the California Institute of Technology, after having moved from University of California Los Angeles.
Azafullerenes are a class of heterofullerenes in which the element substituting for carbon is nitrogen. They can be in the form of a hollow sphere, ellipsoid, tube, and many other shapes. Spherical azafullerenes resemble the balls used in football (soccer). They are also a member of the carbon nitride class of materials that include beta carbon nitride (β-C3N4), predicted to be harder than diamond. Besides the pioneering work of a couple of academic groups, this class of compounds has so far garnered little attention from the broader fullerene research community. Many properties and structures are yet to be discovered for the highly-nitrogen substituted subset of molecules.
Borospherene (B40) is a cluster molecule containing 40 boron atoms. It is similar to buckminsterfullerene, the "spherical" carbon structure, but with a different symmetry. The discovery of borospherene was announced in July 2014, and is described in the journal Nature Chemistry. Borospherene is similar to other cluster molecules, including buckminsterfullerene (C60), stannaspherene, and plumbaspherene. The molecule includes unusual heptagonal faces.
A metallocarbohedryne is any one of a family of chemical compounds with the generic molecular formula M
8C
12, where M is a transition metal such as titanium, vanadium, zirconium, niobium, hafnium, molybdenum, chromium, or iron.
Carbon peapod is a hybrid nanomaterial consisting of spheroidal fullerenes encapsulated within a carbon nanotube. It is named due to their resemblance to the seedpod of the pea plant. Since the properties of carbon peapods differ from those of nanotubes and fullerenes, the carbon peapod can be recognized as a new type of a self-assembled graphitic structure. Possible applications of nano-peapods include nanoscale lasers, single electron transistors, spin-qubit arrays for quantum computing, nanopipettes, and data storage devices thanks to the memory effects and superconductivity of nano-peapods.
Konstantinos Fostiropoulos is a Greek physicist who has been working in Germany in the areas nano-materials, solid-state physics, molecular physics, astrophysics, and thermodynamics. From 2003 to 2016 he has been founder and head of the Organic Solar Cells Group at the Institute Heterogeneous Materials Systems within the Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin. His scientific works include novel energy materials and photovoltaic device concepts, carbon clusters in the Interstellar Medium, and intermolecular forces of real gases.
Volleyballene term refers to a chemical compound that is a new type of 3D hollow molecule composed of carbon and transition metals, the name is a reference to fullerenes. It is the first buckyball compound to be spiked with scandium atoms. The main feature of these substances is that metal atoms are part of the framework and they are not deposited on the surface of the molecule. The incorporation of the metal atoms avoids their clustering and confers to volleyballene with sites to attach hydrogen mainly. The history of volleyballenes dates from its first prediction in 2016 by Jing Wang et al. A further study based on Density functional Theory (DFT) carried out by Tlahuice-Flores in the same year supports the prediction and provides with Infrared, Raman and UV spectra of the structure for its experimental detection. The structure is described as one Sc8 cluster holding 12 scandium atoms linked to six C10 units on each face. The chemical formula C60Sc20 is close related to C80 fullerene and it has a large HOMO-LUMO gap of 1.47 eV. Further hydrogenation of volleyballene reported a 70-H structure with an adsorption energy of circa -0.11 eV/H2. Moreover, it is expected that the adsorption-desorption reaction can be reached at ambient temperature. Potential use of volleyballenes is hydrogen storage even at ambient conditions.
The solubility of fullerenes is generally low. Carbon disulfide dissolves 8g/L of C60, and the best solvent (1-chloronaphthalene) dissolves 53 g/L. up Still, fullerenes are the only known allotrope of carbon that can be dissolved in common solvents at room temperature. Besides those two, good solvents for fullerenes include 1,2-dichlorobenzene, toluene, p-xylene, and 1,2,3-tribromopropane. Fullerenes are highly insoluble in water, and practically insoluble in methanol.
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