What are fullerenes?

A fullerene is a pure carbon molecule made up of at least 60 atoms of carbon. A fullerene takes shape similar to a soccer ball. It is sometimes denoted as a buckyball after the inventor of the geodesic dome, Buckminster Fuller, for whom the fullerene is more formally named.

Fullerene is an allotrope of carbon in the form of a hollow sphere, ellipsoid, tube, and many other shapes and sizes. Fullerenes are alike in structure to graphite, which is composed of stacked graphene sheets of linked hexagonal rings. Since the finding of fullerenes in 1985, structural variations on fullerenes have evolved well beyond the individual clusters themselves.