Tuesday, February 28, 2012

C84 - a tetrahedral fullerene

I posted a few bead models of C84 before, but I had never given the detailed beading procedure for this molecule. C84 is the smallest achiral fullerene with tetrahedral shape that satisfies the independent pentagon rule (i.e. no two pentagons are connected).

Here is another bead model of C84 consisting of 8mm beads I made yesterday.


The easiest way to make it is to follow the beading path as shown in the following Schlegel diagram. Note that this path does not correspond to the path give by a spiral code.


In principle, one can puncture holes on this molecule and use the resulting structures as building blocks to create more complicated structures or super fullerenes (fused C84 in this case). I will show how this can be done later.

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