handbook of carbon, graphite, diamond and fullerenes

15
The Fullerene Molecules
1.0 GENERAL CONSIDERATIONS
1.1 State of the Art
The recent discovery of a family of large, solid carbon molecules with
great stability, the so-called "fullerenes", has considerably extended the
scope and variety of carbon molecules known to exist and is opening an
entirely new chapter on the physics and chemistry of carbon, with many
potential applications. The fullerenes can be considered as another major
allotrope of carbon and its first stable, finite, discrete molecular form. They
are different, in that respect, from the other two allotropes, graphite and
diamond, which are not molecular but infinite-network solids. The other
known carbon molecules, C2 to C15, are unstable and found only in the vapor
phase at high temperature (see Ch. 2, Sec. 5.0).
The fullerenes are generally arranged in the form of a geodesic
spheroid and thus were named after the inventor of the geodesic dome, the
renowned architect Buckminster Fuller. They were originally (and still are
occasionally) called "buckminster-fullerenes", a name fortunately shortened
to fullerenes. They are also known as "buckyballs".
1.2 Historical Perspective
The fullerenes were discovered in 1985 by Smaliey and Kroto who,
while performing mass-spectroscopy analysis of carbon vapor, observed
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