Fullerene

A carbon allotrope whose atoms form hollow cages, ellipsoids, or tubes from fused rings. Its best-known cage, buckminsterfullerene, contains 60 carbon atoms.

Carbon allotrope: A structural form of carbon with a distinct arrangement of its atoms. Fullerenes are one structural family among carbon’s allotropes.
Fullerene synthesis: Methods for producing molecular carbon cages, including arc discharge and laser ablation of carbon. These techniques made fullerene molecules available for structural and materials research.
Harry Kroto: A British chemist who shared the 1996 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for discovering fullerenes. His interest in carbon-rich stars helped motivate the experiments that revealed C60.
Organic photovoltaics: Solar cells that use organic semiconductors to convert light into electrical energy. Fullerene derivatives have served as electron acceptors in many device designs.
Graphene: A single atom-thick sheet of carbon atoms arranged in a hexagonal lattice. Graphene is flat and open, whereas fullerenes curve their networks into closed or tubular forms.
sp² hybridization: A bonding arrangement in which an atom forms three coplanar sigma bonds and retains a perpendicular p orbital. Each fullerene carbon typically bonds to three neighbors in a curved sp² network.
C60: A spherical fullerene molecule consisting of 60 carbon atoms arranged in a truncated icosahedron. It is the canonical cage and the most extensively studied molecular fullerene.
Robert Curl: An American chemist who shared the 1996 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for discovering fullerenes. He helped bring laser-vaporization expertise to the discovery experiments.
PCBM: A soluble fullerene derivative widely used as an electron acceptor in organic electronics. Its solubility and electron-accepting behavior enabled fullerene-based photovoltaic blends.
Carbon nanotube: A cylindrical nanostructure formed from one or more rolled sheets of carbon atoms. Nanotubes share fullerene-like curvature but extend into long cylinders rather than finite cages.

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