Modelling the Diffusive Growth of Carbon Fullerenes

Abstract

Recently, the present authors proposed a model describing fullerene growth in carbonvapor for which the di usion equation is assumed outside the fullerene and a family of possibleStefan conditions describe the growing fullerene surface. Here we consider a related model, butwith the additional assumption that the fullerene surface atomic density is constant throughoutthe growth process, which is justi ed by experimental data. We show that this constraint onthe fullerene lattice structure limits the solution to one possible Stefan condition. The proposedmodel may be extended to any nanostructure with constant atomic surface density.