Thursday, January 3, 2013

Tetrahedral C28 and related structures

There are only three tetrahedral fullerenes with number of carbon atoms less than that of buckyball. They are C28, C40, and C44, respectively. The spiral code for the smallest tetrahedral fullerene, C28, is [1 2 3 5 7 9 10 11 12 13 14 15]. Following this code, we can easily make its bead model using the standard figure-eight stitch. We can see that, in this molecule, there are 12 pentagons, 3 in a group located at a vertex, and 4 hexagons located on the four faces of the tetrahedron. If we replace these pentagons by heptagons, we get a tetrapod-like structure, in which tri-pentagon vertices become tri-heptagon necks as shown in the following figure.
Using these tetrapods as building blocks, we can get the following diamond-like structure. In fact, this is exactly the structure Mr. Horibe put in the postcard. OK, if we start from other tetrahedral fullerenes such as C40 and C44, we can find out a lot more diamond-like structures.

Natalie Benatta said...

Sehr schön,effektvoll.Ich bin Ihrer Follower geworden.
Natalie

ps. Ich bin Krankenschwester.ich liebe alle Molecules!!

Bih-Yaw Jin said...

Thank you for your interests in this blog. Byjin

Colette said...

You are a young man completly mad ! I'm an old woman leaving in France and fan of your work !