Fullerene Structure and Dynamics: A Magnetic Resonance Potpourri

The stability of geodesic structures was realized and exploited by the architect R. Buckminster Fuller. It was not suspected that such structures are realized on a molecular scale until 1985, when Kroto et al. observed a striking prominence of 60-atom carbon clusters in certain molecular beam experiments.1 They suggested that C60 possessed the truncated icosahedral geometry of a soccer ball. The C70 mass peak was also prominent, and a series of larger C2n clusters was observed to extend out to the limit of the spectrometer. These observations gave rise to the elegant picture of a family of closed-shell carbon molecules, the fullerenes, consisting of 12 pentagonal and two or more six-membered rings.2, 3 The discovery of new methods to produce and purify macroscopic quantities of fullerenes4-8 has allowed spectacular confirmation of this picture. © 1992, American Chemical Society. All rights reserved.