Gentle fragmentation of C60 by strong hydrogenation: a route to synthesizing new materials

Hydrogenation of C60 at 2GPa pressure and high temperature

“…1. That result is consistent with data obtained from XRD, Raman, and IR spectroscopy (discussed below in detail), suggesting that the degree of hydrogenation was not as strong as required for the fragmentation and collapse of C 60 cages observed previously [24,27].…”

“…We experienced a similar problem earlier in attempting to record Raman spectra of samples hydrogenated by reaction with H 2 gas [26,27,30] The Raman spectrum shown in Fig. 2 is very similar to those reported in the literature for C 60 H 36 obtained by both the HPHT method [28] and by transfer hydrogenation [14].…”

“…The gaseous hydrogen obtained by decomposition of AlH 3 should diffuse through a palladium foil separating reagents and C 60 powder. The reaction is thus similar to the gas-phase hydrogenation studied earlier [24][25][26][27]30], but at significantly higher pressure. At very high pressure, some pure C 60 H 36 was previously found to form under particular HPHT conditions [28,31,32].…”

“…The hydrofullerene samples with a high degree of molecular fragmentation and partial collapse of cage structure studied earlier were nearly amorphous [24,25,27].…”

“…Prolonged hydrogenation results in fragmentation of C 60 and complete collapse of its cage structure [26,27]. Those studies suggested a possible route to bulk synthesis of fragmented fullerenes C 58 H x and C 59 H x .…”