Boron Buckyballs
CARBON
Boron Buckyball (Credit: Boris Yakobson/Rice University)
We are all familiar with the well known Buckminsterfullerene; discovered some years ago in 1985 by a group of scientists in the UK and US. including Robert Curl, Harold Kroto and Richard Smalley. They discovered that 60 Carbon atoms can form a stable and hollow spherical type molecule in the shape of a geodesic dome. The dome resembles a building designed by the architect Richard Bukminster Fuller.
A few years ago scientists at Rice University were eventually successful in producing bucky balls made entirely of Boron atoms, and more recently a group at the Graduate University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, led by Prof. Gang Su, made significant progress in the prediction of pure boron buckyballs [Yan et al., physical review B (2008) 78, 201401].
As Boron and Carbon are neighbours in the periodic table you an imagine they share many similar properties, this has led to considerable interest and research in Boron over the past few years. If this is indeed the case then many new opportunities may arise from this new class of compound and may even result in a cost effective route to bulk production of this buckyball.
Su et al have now proposed a generic constructing scheme that shows how to generate a family of novel boron monoelemental, hollow fullerenes which exhibit amongst their properties remarkable stability. They also go on to present an electron counting rule and an isolated hollow rule to show why the predicted boron S-fullerenes are stable and how the electrons in these particular fullerenes are bonded, thereby establishing the relationship between the geometrical and electronic structures of the boron fullerenes.
The scientists behind this discovery are already discussing the relationship between these molecules and those of B80 and boron sheet (NBS), which will lead to a better understanding of their interlinked stability. These findings and continued research will boost further investigations on boron nanostructures both theoretical and experimental and should lead to many new nanostructure discoveries.
