Beyond C60: The Higher Fullerenes

In 1990, Kratschmer, Huffman, et al. reported the preparation of macroscopic quantities of buckminsterfullerene (C₆₀), the third allotropic and first molecular form of carbon, named after Buckminster Fuller, an architect renowned for his geodesic dome structures, by resistive heating of graphite under an inert atmosphere. ¹ In following vigorous developments, the cagelike truncated icosahedral structure of Ceo, resembling a soccer ball, has been firmly established.² This structure had been predicted in 1985 by Kroto, Smalley, et al. at Rice University to account for the exceptional stability of the C₆₀ species in carbon cluster beams produced by laser vaporization of graphite.³ Since 1981, Chapman et al. at UCLA had pursued the preparation of this carbon sphere in a total synthesis approach, which is documented in four Ph.D. theses.⁴ However, it was only after the 1985 communication by the Rice group that a broad range of chemists and physicists became interested in theoretical calculations to predict the structure and properties of buckminsterfullerene. ^{20c, 5} Perhaps the most important data generated between 1985 and 1990 was the four-line IR spectrum of C₆₀, which was crucial for the discovery of the compound in the soot produced by resistive heating of graphite.⁶.