Thomas F Bailey

C60 BuckyBall | Threshold to new chemical bonding concepts and new carbon-only materials.

Mass spectrometric examination of volatiles emitted upon laser defoliation of graphite in the first ten days of September 1985 at Rice University led to discovery of an exceptionally stable volatile freak never-before encountered molecule consisting of only 60 carbon atoms. The discovery arose from three molecular spectroscopists seeking to confirm the existence of carbon molecules in outer space. The glob of 60 carbon atoms was theorized to be spherical of a truncated icosahedron 3D geometry and was reported within the year in the prestigious Nature journal. The nanometer diameter molecule caught the imagination of the world as a nano-sized soccer ball, thus “Buckyball,” short for Buckminsterfullerene named after the recently deceased iconic geodesic dome enthusiast architect, Richard Buckminster Fuller.

Most unfortunate was architectural considerations overwhelming truly elucidating organic chemistry principles developed by August Kekulé 150 years ago regarding benzene that introduced the new bonding concept of aromaticity responsible for the planarity seen in benzene and the 2D graphite allotrope of carbon. The newly discovered fullerene allotrope of carbon and its fullerenic bonding nature is a 3D version of aromaticity with both allotropes involving habitats for free-roaming or delocalized electrons that are responsible for their observed exceptional thermodynamic stabilities. A new allotrope of carbon of even greater electron delocalization and thermodynamic stability was recently patented known as crossene (US 11,718,530).