Buckyballs: their history and discovery

“This year's Nobel Prize in Chemistry has implications for all the natural sciences. The seeds of thediscovery were sowed by a desire to understand the behavior of carbon in red giant stars and interstellar gas clouds. Thediscovery of fullerenes has expanded our knowledge and changed our thinking in chemistry and physics. It has given us new hypotheseson the occurrence of carbon in the universe. It has also led us to discover small quantities of fullerenes in geological formations.Fullerenes are probably present in much larger amounts on earth than previously believed. It has been shown that most sooty flamescontain small quantities of fullerenes. Think of this the next time you light a candle!”

-From the presentation speech for the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, 1996

Introduction

In 1996, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, the most prestigiousaward in the world for chemists, to Richard Smalley, Robert Curl, and Harold Kroto for their discovery of fullerenes. They discoveredfullerenes (also called buckyballs) in 1985, but the special properties of the buckyballs took a few years to prove andcategorize. Although by 1996 no practical applications of buckyballs had been produced, scientists appreciated the directionthis discovery based in organic chemistry had led scientific research, as well as its specific contributions to various otherfields. The accidental discovery of fullerenes also emphasizes the benefits and unexpected results which can arise when scientistswith different backgrounds and research aims collaborate in the laboratory.

What are buckyballs?

Before going into detail about the actual buckyball, we should discuss the element that makes its structurepossible, carbon. Carbon is the sixth element on the periodic table, and has been found to be at least a partial constituent inover 90 per cent of all chemicals known to man. Indeed, its electron-bonding properties grant it a versatility specific tocarbon, allowing it to be so widely functionalized, and more importantly, the reason for life on Earth. Anything that is livingis necessarily chemically based on Carbon atoms, and for this reason, substances containing carbon are called organic compounds,and the study of them is called organic chemistry.

Though carbon is involved in chemistry with all sorts of other elements and compounds, it can also exist inpure carbon states such as graphite and diamond. Graphite and diamond are two different allotropes of carbon. An allotrope is aspecific physical arrangement of atoms of an element. So although diamond and graphite are both pure carbon, because the crystallinestructure of each is significantly different, their chemical and physical properties (as well as value) are very different.