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Scientists used to think
that there were only three allotropes of carbon. Not anymore! In 1985, British scientist
Harry Kroto and American scientist Rick Smalley publicised their new
discovery - a soccer-ball shaped carbon allotrope! They wanted to see
what happened to carbon if they used lasers to vaporise it, so they did
some experimentation. Finding some strange results, they pulled out
toothpicks, wine gums, tape and paper. Yes, even scientists build models
from toothpicks and gums!
After playing around for a
while, Smalley finally managed to make a model of the ball-shaped
molecule they had discovered. It was made of paper and tape, 12
pentagons joined to 20 hexagons, with 60 vertices. This buckyball was
the C60 buckyball, and it's the most famous one. However, physicists,
chemists and other scientists have made buckballs from C32 ("buckybabies")
to C960.
Kroto and Smalley weren't
the first people to discover buckminsterfullerene. Dr. Bill Burch, an
Australian medical physicist, had already made buckminsterfullerene gas
when he wanted an instrument to detect lung clots, but he didn't bother
investigating the particle structure. In 1979, Japanese physicist Sumio
Iijima saw a new carbon structure. He reported that it looked like onion
rings. Still, Kroto and Smalley won a Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
The full name for this
molecule is a buckminsterfullerene. That's pretty long, so it gets
shortened to "buckyball" or "fullerene".
Buckminsterfullerenes were named after an American architect and
philosopher, R. Buckminster Fuller. The molecule is reminiscent of the
geodesic dome Fuller designed.
Buckyballs can be produced
in electric arcs between carbon electrodes in helium. It's believed that
buckyballs can be found in sooty flames and in outer space, especially
around red giants. Buckminsterfullerenes have been found in stardust.
Buckyballs can be used for
lots of different things. Some compounds of buckminsterfullerenes, for
example K3C60, become superconductors at low
temperatures. Derivatives of buckyballs have been used to fight cancer.
Buckminsterfullerenes could be used as catalysts. Buckyballs, being
hollow, could also be used to "cage" other materials.
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