BABY buckyballs should have unusual electrical properties, but nobody has been able to make enough of them to find out. Now Chinese scientists have worked out how to make C50 buckyballs in large quantities for the first time.
Standard buckyballs, properly called buckminsterfullerenes, are hollow spherical molecules in which 60 carbon atoms form a net of pentagons and hexagons that resemble the panels on a soccer ball. Since they were first created artificially in 1985, they have become the focus of global research efforts to exploit their unusual electrical, chemical and mechanical properties.
C50 is more difficult…
