ABSTRACT
Network materials from pure carbon such as fullerenes and carbon nanotubes are excellent examples to explore nano-science and nano-technology on a molecular or low-dimensional solid state level. A lot of research work has been reported and was summarized in several review articles. Compared to this large volume of work rather little is known about the interior of the carbon cages. The reason is the fact that so far all attempts failed to open the fullerene cages and to inspect the interior chemically by studying reactions in the concave environment of the carbon atoms. Experimentalists were left with the cumbersome purification procedure of material where atoms were incidentally encaged during the growth process. Considerable progress was made recently at this point by detecting a possibility to fill at least the nanotubes with other molecules (Smith et al. 1998, Kataura et al. 2001) or more generally, with matter (Meyer et al. 2000). Particular interest at this point was recently dedicated to filling single wall carbon nanotubes (SWCNT) with C60 fullerenes to make so called "peapods".
