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Published online: 3 March 2010 | doi:10.1038/nchina.2010.25

Material chemistry: Romance of the three pentagons

Felix Cheung

Introduction

© (2010) Nature Chemistry

Fullerenes are carbon cages with pentagonal and hexagonal faces, and among them, those that violate the isolated pentagon rule (IPR; no two pentagonal faces may share an edge) are known to be highly reactive. There are several approaches to making IPR-violating fullerenes, but no-one has yet made a fullerene with triple sequentially fused pentagons (TSFPs, pictured top). Suyuan Xie, Xin Lu and co-workers at Xiamen University¹ have now created four chlorinated fullerenes — all with TSFPs.

The researchers vaporized graphite in an arc-discharge reactor filled with helium and carbon tetrachloride (CCl₄) gases to produce a carbon-rich soot containing chlorinated fullerenes. They then used high-performance liquid chromatography to extract various chlorinated fullerenes, namely C₅₄Cl₈, C₅₆Cl₁₂, C₆₆Cl₆ and C₆₆Cl₁₀, from the soot.

X-ray crystallography revealed the structures of the novel chlorinated fullerenes: C₅₄Cl₈ contains two sets of TSFPs; C₅₆Cl₁₂ (pictured bottom) contains one set of TSFPs and two sets of double fused pentagons (highlighted in red and blue, respectively); C₆₆Cl₆ and C₆₆Cl₁₀ both contain one set of TSFPs.

The researchers believe that there are many IPR-violating fullerenes yet to be uncovered. Nevertheless, their findings provide new clues to the formation of fullerenes.

The authors of this work are from:
State Key Laboratory for Physical Chemistry of Solid Surfaces and Department of Chemistry, College of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, Xiamen University, Xiamen, China.

Reference

1. Tan, Y. Z. et al. Chlorofullerenes featuring triple sequentially fused pentagons. Nature Chem. doi:10.1038/nchem.549 (2010). | Article | OpenURL