Bucky Ball

ABSTRACT: The overall concept of nano-technology is that working with smaller particles of nano size (ie.,10-9). The discovery of Bucky ball created a new revolutionary in the field of nanotechnology. Bucky ball is a concept in nanotechnology which has created a great impact in various fiels like electronics, medical, drug delivery, strong devices etc.., Bucky ball is a concept which is still in a developing stage. There are so many effective things yet to be uncovered. In this article, we have discussed the basic ideas about bucky balls such as its structure, history, few properties, synthesis, demerits and some of its applications.
INTRODUCTION:
Bucky ball is the colloquial term of Buckminster fullerene. It was the earliest and the first
Until the discovery of Bucky ball, the graphite and diamond were the only molecules formed using carbon atoms. Even though the founder of Bucky ball was curl, Kroto and Smalley, the fullerene molecule was named after Richard Buckminster fuller (1895-1983) an famous architect, because the structure of Bucky ball looks same as that of the geodesic dome constructed by him. The discovery of Bucky ball led curl, Kroto and Smalley to secure the Nobel Prize for chemistry in 1996. The discovery of Bucky ball happened during the experiment with a cluster of beam using a laser to vaporize a graphite rod in a helium atmosphere in order to produce an carbon plasma. As a result, this experiment indicated that carbon molecule with 60 carbon atoms were formed with spherical structure. Later in 1989, Kratschmer, Fostiropoulos and Huffman produced C60 by carbon arc rod.
DESCRIPTION OF BUCKYBALL:
Bucky ball is an hollow, spherical or ellipsoid molecule composed of carbon atoms of pentagonal and hexagonal faces. The structure consists of 32 faces in which 20 are hexagons and 12 are pentagons. The interesting part is that no two pentagons share a same vertex. This structure resembles the soccer ball (football), the structure is also called as truncated icosahedron. Fullerenes have been found to occur in nature. There exist different Bucky balls depending
Allotropes with larger fullerenes (C72) trapped with lanthanides have higher solubility’s. At room temperature fullerenes dissolve sparingly in many different solvents. The common solvents in which the fullerenes dissolve are toluene and carbon disulfide. Toluene as a solvent, the solubility of fullerene is about 2.8 mg/ml at the room temperature. The solubility of fullerene is inversely proportional to its size (i.e. As size increases the solubility decreases).
TOXICITY AND SAFETY:
When Bucky ball is tested with mice, C60 does not show any toxic effect. Fullerenes without functional group acts as an antioxidant and shows an positive effect. Some fullerenes are highly toxic because of the presence of functional groups, these functional groups are the one which gives toxic nature to the fullerene. Fullerenes in the environment are also toxic because of the organic solvents present in the free space.
AROMATICITY:
Normally electrons are fixed in whatever bond they constitute. Where in aromatic molecules electrons are free to move in between other bonds. By default, all the fullerenes have the Cyclo hexanes in abundance, they are very aromatic, and thus stable, inert carbon