The Chemistry Of The Fullerenes

The closed-cage carbon molecules known as fullerenes provide an entirely new branch of chemistry, materials science, and physics. Fullerene research is now engaging the frenetic attention of thousands of scientists. Initially, the chemistry was relatively slow to develop due to the low availability of material, and the need for state-of-the-art instrumentation for product analysis. This research area is now very definitely up-and-running, and will soon become the main focus of attention in the fullerene field. The number of published papers already runs into hundreds, and the main features of fullerene reactivity have been established. This book describes all of the known types of reactions as well as the means of production, the purification, and the properties of fullerenes.

The closed-cage carbon molecules known as fullerenes provide an entirely new branch of chemistry, materials science, and physics. Fullerene research is now engaging the frenetic attention of thousands of scientists. Initially, the chemistry was relatively slow to develop due to the low availability of material, and the need for state-of-the-art instrumentation for product analysis. This research area is now very definitely up-and-running, and will soon become the main focus of attention in the fullerene field. The number of published papers already runs into hundreds, and the main features of fullerene reactivity have been established. This book describes all of the known types of reactions as well as the means of production, the purification, and the properties of fullerenes.

The creation of the hollow carbon buckminsterfullerene molecule as well as methods to produce and purify bulk quantities of it has triggered an explosive growth of research in the field. Superconducting and magnetic fullerides, atoms trapped inside the fullerene cage, chemically bonded fullerene complexes, and nanometer-scale helical carbon tubes are some of the leading areas that have generated much excitement.This book is intended as a guide to the literature for the scientist who is just entering fullerene research, and will be one more valuable volume to the collection for the established worker. It contains reprints of some sixty most important research papers, with focus especially on those papers that have guided further work in the field. There is also a short review of the field, with references to many other publications.

Fullerenes and nanotubes are two classes of carbon structures or allotropes, which were discovered about 17 years ago. Since that time, many chemical derivatives have been synthesized using fullerenes and nanotubes as building blocks. Particularly promising was the theory that the chemical properties of fullerenes, and certain derivatives, made them likely candidates for anticancer drugs, inhibitors of viruses such as HIV, or even as anti-bacterials. Their cyctotoxicity can also be controlled by specific circumstances. In addition, the funtionalization of nanotubes has not only produced relatively simple derivatives, but also complex hybrids with biological macromolecules, which show unique supramolecular architecture and which are promising in many medical applications. The application of fullerenes and nanotubes in medicine is at the frontier of our knowledge, thus the work in this field represents the basis for future novel developments.

In September 1985, in an attempt to simulate the chemistry in a carbon star, Harry Kroto, Bob Curl and Richard Smalley set up a mass spectrometry experiment to study the plasma produced by focusing a pulsed laser on solid graphite. Serendipitously, a dominant 720 amu mass peak corresponding to a C60 species was revealed in the time-of-flight mass spectrum of the resulting carbon clusters. It was proposed that this C60 cluster had the closed cage structure of a truncated icosahedron (a soccerball) and was named Buckminsterfullerene because geodesic dome concepts, pioneered by the architect Buckminster Fuller, played an important part in arriving at this solution. The signal for a C70 species (840 amu) , proposed to have the ellipsoidal shape of a rugbyball, was also prominent in the early experiments. Five years later, the seminal work of the Sussex! Rice collaboration was triumphantly confirmed as Wolfgang Krlitschmer and Donald Huffman succeeded in producing, and separating, bulk crystalline samples of fullerene material from arc-processed (in an inert gas atmosphere) carbon deposits. From then onwards, fullerene research continued, and still proceeds, at an exhilarating pace. The materials excited the imagination of many diverse classes of scientists, resulting in a truly interdisciplinary field. Many of our old, seemingly well-founded, preconceptions in carbon science had to be radically altered or totally abandoned, as a new round world of chemistry, physics and materials science began to unfold.

This book is the first of its kind to reflect upon the intense and rapidly growing interest in open geodesic polyaromatic molecules, specifically focusing on their synthesis and reactivity in metal binding reactions. The book broadly covers all aspects related to the fullerene fragment chemistry: current synthetic techniques, description of the available members of this new family (which has grown to more than two dozens members, with none being available commercially), molecular geometry and trends in the solid state packing, as well as extensions into physical properties and new buckybowl-based molecules and materials. It covers fundamental research related to a new class of hydrocarbons, namely open geodesic polyarenes that map onto the surfaces of fullerenes (and referred to as fullerene fragments or buckybowls.