Dawn of the Fullerenes: Conjecture and Experiment (Nobel Lecture)

摘要

Several individuals in widely separated parts of the world had envisioned the class of carbon cage compounds we now know as the fullerenes. in particular C_(60), long before we began our work. The earliest reference in the area appears to be the somewhat whimsical proposal by Jones that giant carbon cage molecules, which we would now call giant fullerenes, might be synthesized by introducing defects in the graphitic sheet to allow them to curve and close. He believed that such molecules should exhibit unique properties, such as having a very low density. He realized some time later that the required defects would be pentagons.