Carbon60
Created | Updated May 1, 2002
What is Carbon60?
Carbon60 or C60 is an allotrope of carbon*. Diamond and Graphite are allotropes of carbon (although it is more graphitic in nature, so strictly it is not a new allotrope, but rather a variation on graphite).
The Discovery
C60 was discovered circa 1985 by Harry Kroto and Rick Smalley by accident
*. Being scientists, they and their colleagues were rather curious and they took a much closer look at it. They figured out what shape this molecule was and that it was really big*. Unfortunately they could not prove it because they could not make enough of the stuff. It took until 1990, when some chaps named Krätschmer, Fostiropoulos and Huffman made enough of the stuff that they could examine it more closely.
They proved that it looked like a soccer ball*, just as Kroto and Smalley et al had suggested.. A big spherical molecule with 60 carbon atoms in it that looked like a football, and it was hollow too, with the atoms arranged in pentagons and hexagons. It turned out that this crazy molecule did lots of very interesting things and lots of people have been playing with it ever since and are still discovering new things about it.
So what does it do?
C60 does lots of interesting things because of its shape and because of the way it spins around and wobbles and because of the way all the electrons swim all over it. There are similar molecules such as C70 which looks kind of like a rugby ball, and nanotubes *. All these molecules are called Fullerines after an architect named Buckminster Fuller. Mr. Fuller used to design wonderfully efficient, gigantic, self-supporting, beautiful, geodesic domes out of hexagons and pentagons and it seemed only fitting that he should be honoured this way.
C60 is soluble in many organic * solvents and is reddish brown when dissolved in benzene, and also a rather fetching purple in chlorobenzene. The crystalline solid is dark brown and it smells a bit like caramel *.
So what are the applications then?
- It’s stronger than it looks.
- It superconducts (conducts electricity really well) when you fiddle with it enough.
- It insulates (doesn’t conduct at all) on that same token.
- It conducts like an ordinary metal.
- It even semiconducts, * (under the right conditions).
- And apparently, you can make it switch between all these states by playing with it
- Some pharmacutical companies are developing products containing C60 to make you look younger*
- Some people have made transistors out of it.
- It’s hollow, so you can wrap it around single atoms and trap them "in a cage."
- Somebody went and made an amplifier using a single molecule of it.
- It’s optically active, meaning that if you put it in front of a light source, you can use it to switch the light on and off, and doing things like that can be really useful if you are a telecommunications engineer.
- Bioactivity is another one, C60 can be made to fiddle with DNA and some sugars.
There is more, a great many academic papers have been published concerning C60, but the list could become long and boring and it’s growing daily. It could also be the first step into nanotechnology….
So there you have it a molecule so new and wierd, they don’t even know what to do with it yet.
