When was the buckyball discovered

The story of buckyballs begins in in the laboratory of British astronomer Harold Kroto. He joined American scientists Richard Smalley and Robert Curl, who were studying similar chains or clusters of atoms in the laboratory. Together, they devised instruments to allow them to simulate the heat and pressure of a Red Giant to study these clusters. To do this, they put carbon in a helium-filled chamber and vaporized it with a laser.

The resulting carbon molecules held exactly 60 carbon atoms, arranged into a roughly spherical shape. Buckyballs generated a lot of excitement in scientific circles, and earned Curl, Kroto, and Smalley a Nobel Prize in , all before any good use for them had been dreamed up. Nonetheless, scientists looked for ways to manufacture them in larger quantities, if only to explore their unique properties.

Buckyballs, they were discovering, could bounce, return to their original shape if squeezed, and spin at amazingly high speeds. By , experimenters in Germany and the U.

And by using a slightly different process to make the soot, scientists were able to make carbon molecules in the form of tubes, or even tubes-within-tubes. These tubes became known as nanotubes. Still, though, there were no apparent uses for these scientific curiosities. Subsequently, tubes of fullerenes with capped ends were also discovered.

There is considerable belief that in the 21st century buckyballs and buckytubes may replace silicon as the building blocks for future electronic devices in computers and communication devices. Buckytubes are also the strongest materials known and are already finding applications in composite materials, as surface coatings to improve wear resistance, and as components in scientific instruments. Buckyballs may find application in drug delivery systems.

With the daytime discussion seemingly reaching a dead end, part of the group went to a favorite Mexican restaurant to celebrate the discovery of C Smalley worked into the night at his home computer trying to generate a structure.

When that failed, he turned to low-tech tools: paper, tape, and scissors. He began by cutting out hexagons, about an inch on each side, from a pad of legal paper. When he attached the hexagons he found that he had to cheat a bit to get the surface to curve.

Eventually, he realized that even with cheating the hexagons would not close. Now no cheating was required. The hexagons automatically assumed the shape of a bowl. Smalley had stumbled through trial-and-error on a mathematical truth Fuller employed in his domes: a sheet of hexagons can be made to curl by using pentagons. The Nature letter describing C 60 was attractive and logical, but seeing a line in a mass spectrum did not convince all scientists of the discovery of a new allotrope of carbon.

The presenter of the Nobel noted that the discovery of fullerenes has implications for all the natural sciences. It was born of astronomy, by the wish to grasp the behavior of carbon in red giant stars in interstellar gas clouds and by the work of Curl and Smalley in cluster chemistry at Rice University.

It has expanded knowledge of chemistry and physics. Fullerenes have been found in geological formations and in sooty flames. Possible future uses include in antibiotics and as armor. Research on fullerenes has resulted in the synthesis of a steadily increasing number of new compounds, already more than one thousand. The discovery of fullerenes also led to research in carbon nanotubes, the cylindrical cousins of buckyballs, and the development of new fields of advanced materials.

Carbon nanotubes' unique structural and bonding properties, whereby inner tubes in a multi-walled nanotube can slide within an outer tube, suggest uses in tiny motors and as ball bearings and lubricants. Twenty-five years after their discovery, fullerenes provide abundant research opportunities in pure chemistry, materials science, pharmaceutical chemistry, and nanotechnology.

Concerning the question of what kind of carbon atom structure might give rise to a superstable species, we suggest a truncated icosahedron, a polygon with 60 vertices and 32 faces, 12 of which are pentagonal and 20 hexagonal. The text of the plaque commemorating the development reads:. In this building in early September , a team of scientists discovered a previously unknown pure carbon molecule, C 60 , which they dubbed buckminsterfullerene.

The structure, a truncated icosahedron with 32 faces, 12 pentagonal and 20 hexagonal, has the shape of a soccer ball. Nicknamed buckyballs, this first known stable molecular form of carbon not only opened up a new field of organic chemistry but also, through the development of carbon nanotubes, a new field of materials science.

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