What is a "buckyball"and why does it matter?
Named after the US architect and engineer Richard Buckminster Fuller, the first buckyball was a hollow cage made of 60 carbon atoms and arranged in pentagons and hexagons similar to a soccer ball, reported Scientific American.
It was founded by Robert Curl, Harold Kroto and Richard Smalley in 1985 – a discovery which allowed many others to delve into creating "more carbon structures with impressive qualities, such as carbon nanotubes and the single-atom-thick graphene. Since then, material scientists have also searched for buckyball-like structures made of other elements."
Essentially, the Buckyball is a hollow molecular structure, initially created from carbon atoms. Since it is the shape and general structure of a soccer ball, it gets the "ball" moniker.
Richard Buckminster Fuller, by the way, used similar shapes in designing his domes.
But now we have the Boron Buckyball, in the news today because researchers at Brown University in the United States and Shanxi and Tsinghua Universities in China have created a Buckyball while "working on (a) different molecular structure of Boron."
"The new material just like the Buckyball which was created using Carbon is hollow and could find immense use in nanotechnology," reports theWestsidestory.com.
Recently, it has only been speculation that materials other than carbon could form similar hollow molecular structures. Boron, according to gizmag.com, has been a prime suspect since it is, "Sitting next to carbon on the periodic table, boron has one less electron than its neighbor, meaning any boron cage would have a different number of atoms."
Brown chemistry professor Lai-Sheng Wang and team used high-powered supercomputers, modeling more than 10,000 "possible arrangements of 40 boron atoms bonded to each other. As well as estimating the shapes of the structures, the computer simulations estimate the electron binding energy of each structure, with the spectrum of binding energies serving as a unique fingerprint for each potential structure," according to gizmag.com.
Ultimately, "Where buckyball molecules feature 20 hexagons and 12 pentagons of carbon atoms arranged in a way that provides a smooth spherical surface, borospherene consists of 48 triangles, four seven-sided rings and two six-sided rings. This results in a shape that is a little bumpier, with several atoms sticking out from the sides."
It is too early to know how the development could be used, but the finding is significant Wang said.
"This is the first time that a boron cage has been observed experimentally," said Lai-Sheng Wang, a professor of chemistry at Brown who led the team that made the discovery, according to a press release. "The fact that boron has the capacity to form this kind of structure is very interesting.
"For us, just to be the first to have observed this, that's a pretty big deal," Wang said. "Of course if it turns out to be useful that would be great, but we don't know yet. Hopefully this initial finding will stimulate further interest in boron clusters and new ideas to synthesize them in bulk quantities."