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Portrait of Buckminsterfullerene

Science · Chemistry

Buckminsterfullerene

1985

Chemistry — carbon allotropes

Buckminsterfullerene is the C60 molecule: sixty carbon atoms arranged as a hollow truncated icosahedron, twelve pentagonal and twenty hexagonal faces, exactly the pattern of a traditional football. It turned up in September 1985 at Rice University, where Harry Kroto, Robert Curl and Richard Smalley were vaporising graphite with a laser to mimic the chemistry of carbon-rich red giant stars, and found an unexpectedly stable sixty-atom cluster dominating the spectrum. They named it after the architect Richard Buckminster Fuller, whose geodesic domes it resembles. Until then carbon was assumed to come in two forms, diamond and graphite; C60 opened a third family, the fullerenes, and with it nanotubes and much of carbon nanotechnology.

How to spot them

  • ▸Sixty carbon atoms in a hollow cage shaped like a football
  • ▸Twelve pentagons and twenty hexagons — a truncated icosahedron
  • ▸Named after an American architect famous for geodesic domes
  • ▸The third allotrope of carbon, after diamond and graphite
  • ▸Nicknamed the 'buckyball'

Key facts

A hollow cage of sixty carbon atoms with twelve pentagonal and twenty hexagonal faces — the shape of a traditional football

A truncated icosahedron: 60 vertices, 32 faces, 90 edges.

Discovered at Rice University in 1985 during experiments meant to reproduce the carbon chemistry of red giant stars (1985)

Graphite was vaporised by laser; a 60-atom peak dominated the mass spectrum and refused to go away.

Named after the American architect whose geodesic domes it resembles

Richard Buckminster Fuller, whose dome for the 1967 Montreal Expo the team had in mind.

Kroto, Curl and Smalley shared the 1996 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for finding it (1996)

Kroto worked at Sussex, Curl and Smalley at Rice.

Krätschmer and Huffman found how to make it by the gram in 1990, by striking an electric arc between graphite rods (1990)

Before that it existed only as a peak in a mass spectrum; bulk supply turned it into a real branch of chemistry.

Detected in space in 2010 by the Spitzer Space Telescope, in the planetary nebula Tc 1 (2010)

A neat vindication: the molecule was found on Earth while trying to explain interstellar carbon.

Dissolves in toluene or benzene to give a striking magenta solution

As a solid it is a mustard-brown powder.

Key ideas

  • Euler's polyhedron formula forces any closed cage of hexagons and pentagons to contain exactly twelve pentagons, however large it grows — which is why footballs and these cages share a pattern.
  • The isolated pentagon rule: the sixty-atom cage is uniquely stable because it is the smallest in which no two pentagons touch, which minimises strain.

Quick-fire facts

  • •The discovery paper, 'C60: Buckminsterfullerene', appeared in Nature on 14 November 1985; the work itself took about eleven days that September.
  • •Kroto, Curl and Smalley won the 1996 Nobel Prize in Chemistry; the students James Heath and Sean O'Brien, co-authors of the paper, were not included.
  • •The Japanese chemist Eiji Osawa had proposed such a molecule in 1970 in a Japanese-language journal, which went unnoticed in the West.
  • •The whole family is called the fullerenes; C70 is the rugby-ball-shaped next member, and carbon nanotubes are cylindrical relatives.
  • •It is about 0.7 nanometres across, and is one of the largest objects shown to display quantum wave–particle interference.
  • •Buckminster Fuller died in 1983, two years before the molecule was named after him.
  • •The nickname 'buckyball' is now more common than the full name; encapsulating an atom inside the cage gives an 'endohedral fullerene'.
  • •Common misconception: it was not made to order. It was an accident of astrochemistry — the team were modelling how long carbon chains form near dying stars.

Drill it — 8 cards

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Sources