Chemistry & Materials · 1985
C60: Buckminsterfullerene
Harold W. Kroto, James R. Heath, Sean C. O'Brien, Robert F. Curl, Richard E. Smalley
Overview
The discovery of C60, a soccer-ball-shaped molecule of sixty carbon atoms. While vaporising graphite, the team found an unusually stable carbon cluster and proposed it was a hollow truncated-icosahedron cage, naming it after the architect Buckminster Fuller.
Discovered fullerenes, a new form of carbon; won the 1996 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
Key findings
Methods
Laser vaporisation of graphite into a supersonic helium beam, with time-of-flight mass spectrometry revealing a dominant peak at 720 atomic mass units (60 carbons), interpreted via geometric reasoning about closed carbon cages.
Keywords
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