ABSTRACT
Fullerenes are a class of carbon allotropes in the form of hollow, closed cages of carbon atoms. Harold W. Kroto, Robert F. Curl, Richard E. Smalley, and their team discovered fullerenes serendipitously in 1985 at Rice University during a series of laser vaporization experiments on graphite in which they were probing by mass spectrometry the carbon clusters formed in the atmospheres of giant red stars [1-3]. The prominent all-carbon structure formed during those experiments on graphite consisted of 60 carbon atoms or C60 [1,2]. Architect Buckminster Fuller’s 1960s geodesic domes provided a clue to the structure of C60, which was proposed to have a soccer ball-like structure [1,4]. In honor of Fuller the C60 molecule was named buckminsterfullerene and the new class of all-carbon caged molecules was named fullerenes [1,2,5]. For their discovery of C60, Kroto, Curl, and Smalley were awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1996.
