Essays. FSF Columns

A free buckyball rotates merrily through space at one hundred million revolutions per second. It's just over one nanometer across. Buckminsterfullerene by the gross forms a solid crystal, is stable at room temperature, and is an attractive mustard-yellow color. A heap of crystallized buckyballs stack very much like pool balls, and are as soft as graphite. It's thought that buckyballs will make good lubricants -- something like molecular ball bearings.

When compressed, crystallized buckyballs squash and flatten readily, down to about seventy percent of their volume. They then refused to move any further and become extremely hard. Just *how* hard is not yet established, but according to chemical theory, compressed buckyballs may be considerably harder than diamond. They may make good shock absorbers, or good armor.

But this is only the begi

A thin film of buckyballs can double the frequency of laser light passing through it. Twisted or deformed buckyballs might act as optical switches for future fiber-optic networks. Buckyballs with dangling branches of nickel, palladium, or platinum may serve as new industrial catalysts.

The electrical properties of buckyballs and their associated compounds are very unusual, and therefore very promising. Pure C60 is an insulator. Add three potassium atoms, and it becomes a low- temperature superconductor. Add three more potassium atoms, and it becomes an insulator again! There's already excited talk in industry of making electrical batteries out of buckyballs.

Then there are the "buckybabies:" C28, C32, C44, and C52. The lumpy, angular buckybabies have received very little study to date, and heaven only knows what they're capable of, especially when doped, bleached, twisted, frozen or magnetized. And then there are the *big* buckyballs: C240, C540, C960. Molecular models of these monster buckyballs look like giant chickenwire beachballs.

There doesn't seem to be any limit to the upper size of a buckyball. If wrapped around one another for internal support, buckyballs can (at least theoretically) accrete like pearls. A truly titanic buckyball might be big enough to see with the naked eye. Conceivably, it might even be big enough to kick around on a playing field, if you didn't mind kicking an anomalous entity with unknown physical properties.

Carbon-fiber is a high-tech construction material which has been seeing a lot of use lately in te

C70, a buckyball cousin shaped like a rugby ball, seems to be useful in producing high-tech films of artificial diamond. Then there are "fuzzyballs" with sixty strands of hydrogen hair, "bu

This sudden wealth of new high-tech slang indicates the potential riches of this new and multidisciplinary field of study, where physics, electronics, chemistry and materials-science are all overlapping, right now, in an exhilirating microsoccerball scrimmage.

Today there are more than fifty different teams of scientists investigating buckyballs and their relations, including industrial heavy-hitters from AT&T, IBM and Exxon. SCIENCE magazine voted buckminsterfullerene "Molecule of the Year" in 1991. Buckyball papers have also appeared in NATURE, NEW SCIENTIST, SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, even FORTUNE and BUSINESS WEEK. Buckyball breakthroughs are coming well-nigh every week, while the fax machines sizzle in labs around the world. Buckyballs are strange, elegant, beautiful, very intellectually sexy, and will soon be commercially hot.

In chemical terms, the discovery of buckminsterfullerene -- a carbon sphere -- may well rank with the discovery of the benzene ring -- a carbon ring -- in the 19th century. The benzene ring (C6H6) brought the huge field of aromatic chemistry into being, and with it a enormous number of industrial applications.

But what was this "discovery," and how did it come about?

In a sense, like carbon itself, buckyballs also came to us from outer space. Donald Huffman and Wolfgang Kratschmer were astrophysicists studying interstellar soot. Huffman worked for the University of Arizona in Tucson, Kratschmer for the Max Planck Institute in Heidelberg. In 1982, these two gentlemen were superheating graphite rods in a low-pressure helium atmosphere, trying to replicate possible soot-making conditions in the atmosphere of red-giant stars. Their experiment was run in a modest bell-jar zapping apparatus about the size and shape of a washing-machine. Among a great deal of black gunk, they actually manufactured miniscule traces of buckminsterfullerene, which behaved oddly in their spectrometer. At the time, however, they didn't realize what they had.

In 1985, buckministerfullerene surfaced again, this time in a high-tech laser-vaporization cluster-beam apparatus. Robert Curl and Richard Smalley, two professors of chemistry at Rice University in Houston, knew that a round carbon molecule was theoretically possible. They even knew that it was likely to be yellow in color. And in August 1985, they made a few nanograms of it, detected it with mass spectrometers, and had the honor of naming it, along with their colleagues Harry Kroto, Jim Heath and Sean O'Brien.

In 1985, however, there wasn't enough buckminsterfullerene around to do much more than theorize about. It was "discovered," and named, and argued about in scientific journals, and was an intriguing intellectual curiosity. But this exotic substance remained little more than a lab freak.

And there the situation languished. But in 1988, Huffman and Kratschmer, the astrophysicists, suddenly caught on: this "C60" from the chemists in Houston, was probably the very same stuff they'd made by a different process, back in 1982. Harry Kroto, who had moved to the University of Sussex in the meantime, replicated their results in his own machine in England, and was soon producing enough buckminsterfullerene to actually weigh on a scale, and measure, and purify!

The Huffman/Kratschmer process made buckminsterfullerene by whole milligrams. Wow! Now the entire arsenal of modern chemistry could be brought to bear: X-ray diffraction, crystallography, nuclear magnetic resonance, chromatography. And results came swiftly, and were published. Not only were buckyballs real, they were weird and wonderful.

In 1990, the Rice team discovered a yet simpler method to make buckyballs, the so-called "fullerene factory." In a thin helium atmosphere inside a metal tank, a graphite rod is placed near a graphite disk. Enough simple, brute electrical power is blasted through the graphite to generate an electrical arc between the disk and the tip of the rod. When the end of the rod boils off, you just crank the stub a little closer and turn up the juice. The resultant exotic soot, which collects on the metal walls of the chamber, is up to 45 percent buckyballs.