Molecular Fullerides
Abstract
The closed shell structures of certain all-carbon fragments originally observed in mass
spectroscopy experiments leads to the enhanced stability of these species, known as
fullerenes, which have excited sufficient interest amongst chemists and physicists over the last
decade to warrant the award of the 1996 Nobel Prize for Chemistry to their discoverers.
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Studies of the stability, symmetry, and consequent remarkable properties of fullerenes began in
earnest in 1991 with the development of a technique enabling the production and purification
of macroscopic quantities of material. The best known and most widely studied fullerene is the
truncated icosahedral C60 molecule, which forms the basis of the present work.