What is C60 and why is it so important?
C60 is a molecule that consists of 60 carbon atoms, arranged as 12 pentagons and 20 hexagons. The shape is the same as that of a soccer ball: The black pieces of leather are the pentagons, the hexagons are white. There are 60 different points where three of the leather patches meet. Imagine a carbon atom sitting at each of these points, and you have a model of the C60 molecule. That model, however, is vastly out of scale: If the C60 molecule were the size of a soccer ball, then the soccer ball in turn would be roughly the size of the earth. The most striking property of the C60 molecule is its high symmetry. There are 120 symmetry operations, like rotations around an axis or reflections in a plane, which map the molecule onto itself. This makes C60 the molecule with the largest number of symmetry operations, the most symmetric molecule. more under : http://www.fkf.mpg.de/andersen/fullerene…
