FULLERENE

Fullerene

A fullerene is any molecule composed entirely of carbon, in the form of a hollow sphere, ellipsoid, tube, and many other shapes. Spherical fullerenes are also called buckyballs, and they resemble the balls used in football . Cylindrical ones are called carbon nanotubes or buckytubes. Fullerenes are similar in structure to graphite, which is composed of stacked graphene sheets of linked hexagonal rings; but they may also contain pentagonal rings.

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fullerene

Noun

  1. any of a class of allotropes of carbon having hollow molecules whose atoms lie at the vertices of a polyhedron having 12 pentagonal and 2 or more hexagonal faces
  2. any closed-cage compound having twenty or more carbon atoms consisting entirely of 3-coordinate carbon atoms
  3. Th e class of carbon allotropes consisting of tubular carbon molecules (carbon nanotubes) and spheroidal carbon molecules (traditional fullerenes)


The above text is a snippet from Wiktionary: fullerene
and as such is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

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