A fullerene is any molecule composed entirely of carbon, in the form of a hollow sphere, ellipsoid, or tube. Spherical fullerenes are also called buckyballs, and cylindrical ones are called carbon nanotubes or buckytubes. Fullerenes are similar in structure to graphite, which is composed of stacked graphene sheets of linked hexagonal rings; but they may also contain pentagonal (or sometimes heptagonal) rings.
The first fullerene to be discovered, and the family’s namesake, was buckminsterfullerene (C60), prepared in 1985 by Harold Kroto, James Heath, Sean O’Brien, Robert Curl and Richard Smalley at Rice University. The name was an homage to Richard Buckminster Fuller, whosegeodesic domes it resembles. Fullerenes have since been found to occur (if rarely) in nature.[1]
The discovery of fullerenes greatly expanded the number of known carbon allotropes, which until recently were limited to graphite, diamond, and amorphous carbon such as soot and charcoal. Buckyballs and buckytubes have been the subject of intense research, both for their unique chemistry and for their technological applications, especially in materials science, electronics, and nanotechnology.
Icosahedral C60H60 cage was mentioned in 1965 as a possible topological structure.The existence of C60 was predicted by Eiji Osawa of Toyohashi University of Technology in 1970.He noticed that the structure of a corannulene molecule was a subset of a soccer-ball shape, and he hypothesised that a full ball shape could also exist. His idea was reported in Japanese magazines, but did not reach Europe or the Americas.
Also in 1970, R. W.Henson (then of the Atomic Energy Research Establishment) proposed the structure and made a model of C60. The evidence for this new form of carbon was very weak and was not accepted, even by his colleagues. The results were never published but were acknowledged in Carbon in 1999.
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