Buckminsterfullerene

The C60 carbon molecule, shaped like a soccer ball, named in honor of Buckminster Fuller.

Buckminsterfullerene is a molecule of pure carbon with the formula C60. Its sixty carbon atoms sit at the vertices of a truncated icosahedron — a closed cage of twenty hexagons and twelve pentagons that looks like a soccer ball — with each atom bonded to three neighbors. As a solid it is black, and it dissolves in hydrocarbon solvents to give a violet solution. It is the most common naturally occurring fullerene, found in small amounts in soot and detected in interstellar space and around certain stars.

The molecule was identified in 1985 by Harold Kroto, James R. Heath, Sean O'Brien, Robert Curl, and Richard Smalley at Rice University, who used laser vaporization of graphite to produce carbon clusters and recognized the unusually stable 60-atom cluster as a closed spherical cage. Kroto, Curl, and Smalley shared the 1996 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the discovery of C60 and the broader family of fullerenes.

The discoverers named the molecule after R. Buckminster Fuller because its structure recalled the geodesic domes he had popularized. The naming is loosely apt rather than exact: Fuller's domes triangulate their faces and push vertices outward onto a sphere, whereas C60 is, geometrically, a naturally occurring Goldberg polyhedron. The shortened popular name is "buckyball." The molecule's discovery opened a new field of carbon chemistry, and it has been studied intensively for potential uses in materials science, electronics, and medicine.

See Also

• R. Buckminster Fuller (R. Buckminster Fuller) — the central figure
• Harold Kroto (Harold Kroto) — co-discoverer who proposed the name
• Richard Smalley (Richard Smalley) — co-discoverer and Nobel laureate
• Synergetics (Synergetics) — Fuller's geometry of nature's structuring

Sources

• Buckminsterfullerene — Wikipedia