The Structural Chemistry of Crystalline Carbon: Geometry, Stability, and Electronic Spectrum

Discovering the fullerenes

“…A little later, Jones realized that a pentagon would serve nicely as the required defect in an otherwise hexagonal lattice to produce a complex curvature (Jones, 1982). The notion that C 60 would be a closed-shell molecule with a very large HOMO-LUMO gap, which is a wellappreciated signature of chemical stability, fell to Bochvar and Gal'pern (1973) and Stankevich et al (1984), who actually did the relevant Hü ckel calculations in Russia well over a decade before we ever got into the game.…”

Fullerenes

“…Early Russian workers showed by Hiickel calculations that C 6 o should have a large electronic gap between the highest occupied molecular orbital (HOMO) and the lowest unoccupied molecular orbital (LUMO). 3 ' 4 These early theoretical suggestions for icosahedral Ceo were not widely appreciated, and some of this literature was Only rediscovered after the experimental work of Kroto and co-workers in the middle 1980's 5 established the stability of the C 60 molecule in the gas phase. Concurrently, astrophysicists were trying to identify some unusual IR emissions of interstellar dust from carbon stars, and this work also suggested the possibility of larger carbon clusters.…”

Symmetry, space, stars andC60

“…We also discovered that C 60 itself had already been proposed by Osawa in a Japanese article 15 years earlier (Osawa, 1970) and in a book with Yoshida (Yoshida and Osawa, 1971). Not only that, Bochvar and Gal'pern (1973) had even carried out a Huckel calculation and published the pattern of the molecular orbitals (Stankevich et al, 1984). We also discovered that Orville Chapman at UCLA had initiated a programme aimed at the synthesis of the molecule (private communication).…”

“…The molecule had, however, a prehistory: The earliest paper which describes the C 60 molecule is to be found in Kagaku (in Japanese), where Eiji Osawa in 1970 suggested that it should be stable (Osawa, 1970(Osawa, ,1971) and the following year discussed its possible aromatic properties in more detail in a book with Yoshida (Yoshida and Osawa, 1971). Bochvar and Gal'pern published a theoretical study in 1972 (Bochvar and Gal'pern, 1973; see also Stankevich et al, 1984). Somewhat earlier, in 1966, David Jones had conjectured that if pentagonal disclinations could be introduced among the hexagons in a graphene sheet, the sheet would close into a hollow balloon (Jones, 1966(Jones, , 1982.…”