A Brief History of C60 - Fullerenes and the Buckyball
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| Audience/Grade: | College Freshman - Continuing Education |
| Discipline(s): |
Chemical, Biochemical, Biomolecular Engineering Chemistry |
| Special Topic(s): |
History of Technology |
| Learning Resource Type: | Reference - Article/Document |
| Media Type: | WWW |
| Author(s): | Anderson Group |
| Description: | Website on the history of C-60 and fullerene compounds. "C60 is a molecule that consists of 60 carbon atoms, arranged as 12 pentagons and 20 hexagons. The shape is the same as that of a soccer ball: The black pieces of leather are the pentagons, the hexagons are white. There are 60 different points where three of the leather patches meet. Imagine a carbon atom sitting at each of these points, and you have a model of the C60 molecule. That model, however, is vastly out of scale: If the C60 molecule were the size of a soccer ball, then the soccer ball in turn would be roughly the size of the earth. The most striking property of the C60 molecule is its high symmetry. There are 120 symmetry operations, like rotations around an axis or reflections in a plane, which map the molecule onto itself. This makes C60 the molecule with the largest number of symmetry operations, the most symmetric molecule. The C60 molecule was discovered by Harold Kroto, James Heath, Sean O'Brien, Robert Curl, and Richard Smalley in 1985 (Nature 318, 162). The group actually tried to understand the absorption spectra of interstellar dust, which they suspected to be related to some kind of long-chained carbon molecules. Unfortunately they could not solve that problem. But their work was not completely unsuccessful, since in the course of their experiments they discovered the Buckyball which generated so much excitement among scientists and won Curl, Kroto, and Smalley the 1996 Nobel prize in chemistry." |
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| Keywords: | fullerenes, fullerene compounds, buckyball |
| Usage Tip | |
| Use of Resource: | History of technology |
| Difficulty: | Medium |
| Interactivity Level: | Low |
| Version Info | |
| Publication Date: | October 2007 |
| Platform/Format: | WWW |
| Cost: | Free |
| Download URL: | http://www.fkf.mpg.de/andersen/fullerene/intro.html |
| Metadata: | IEEE LOM Record |
| Collection: |
NEEDS
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