Chemistry

R.D. Johnson, G. Meijer, D.S. Bethune, "C60 has icosahedral symmetry," Journal of the American Chemical Society, 112:8983- 84, 1990.

Robert D. Johnson (IBM Almaden Research Center, San Jose, Calif.): "C60, `buckminsterfullerene,' has 60 carbon atoms, and the proposed molecular structure of a truncated icosahedron means that all 60 carbons must be chemically equivalent. The 13C NMR spectrum of such a molecule would be a single line. Unaware of the breakthrough made by Kreschmer and Huffman that C60 is solvent extractable (Nature, 347: 354-58, 1990 [Hot Papers, The Scientist, Aug. 19, 1991, page 15]), we made our samples by sublimation of graphitic soot. Our first sample was only 60 micrograms. It required many scans, and the judicious addition of relaxation reagent, but the peak was there--a single resonance at 143 ppm. This position is consistent with a strained olefinic or aromatic carbon, so the spectrum is very strong evidence for the...