Thursday, May 31, 2012

Helically coiled carbon nanotube derived from torus 120

I made another HCCNT (Helically coiled carbon nanotube) derived from the parent molecule, carbon nanotorus with 120 carbon atoms yesterday.
The construction of this carbon helix is quite straightforward. First we should know that this structure can be decomposed into six strips. To simplify the weaving process, one should start from the inner part of HCCNT.
To make a helical tube, one still need to finish the remaining two strips. Particularly, we need to be careful about the relative position between two neighbored pentagons. The systematic way to generate a whole family of HCCNTs from a parent TCNT is based on the concept of horizontal shift parameters (HSP). By applying a suitable HSP, one can create a whole family of HCCNTs.
The details of structural rules of HCCNTs can be found in the following three papers we published:

Chuang, C.; Fan, Y.-C.; Jin, B.-Y.* Generalized Classification of Toroidal and Helical Carbon Nanotubes J. Chem. Info. Model. 2009, 49, 361-368.
Chuang, C; Jin, B.-Y.* Hypothetical toroidal, cylindrical, helical analogs of C60 J. Mol. Graph. Model. 2009, 28, 220-225.
Chuang, C.; Fan, Y.-C.; Jin, B.-Y. On the Possible Geometries of Helically Coiled Carbon Nanotubes J. Mol. Struct. 2012, 1008, 1-7.


In fact, Chern made a bead model of the same structure a few years ago. But in the Bridges conference held in Pecs, Hungary, I met Laura Shea and gave that model to her as a souvenir. Since then, both Chern and I didn't make any new model of helically coiled carbon nanotubes.

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