last week the Google logo looked really
strange had the molecule in the shape of
a football in the middle of it so why
was it and what was special
the molecule was C 60 60 carbon atoms
joined together like a football which is
known by a rather strange name of
buckminsterfullerene or some people just
called it buckyballs and most chemists
just called it C 60 and the reason it
was on the Google logo is because it was
the 25th anniversary of its discovery
I've got two samples one sample is
carbon this is something called
extracted from from pencil this morning
so this carbon contains mostly graphite
but rather boring black powder so this
is just ordinary carbon the other sample
is a little bit more exciting for me
anyway
and this is something called
buckminsterfullerene so we've got here
this little clusters of 60 carbon atoms
forming this shape and I'm just going to
show you how properties of ordinary
Graffiti carbon are different to
properties of buckminsterfullerene now
it's discoveries a bit misleading
because it was actually only detected by
harry kroto and Rick Smalley in a
spectrum of vapor that was evaporated
from a piece of carbon by laser pulse
they didn't separate out any solid or
anything like that they just saw peak at
mass 720 which corresponded to 60 carbon
atoms they then spent days trying to
work out how 60 carbon atoms would fit
together and they came up with this
wonderful shape and they asked one of
their mathematical friends does it have
a special name and the friend said yes
it's called the soccer ball so you see
some chemists are not very sporting Lee
aware anyway there were six years of
argument was C 60 a special molecule or
did it just happen to be in there
experiment they found a molecule of mass
720 and it was only in 1991 that solid C
60 was separated out and isolated in
reefs
amounts and then instead of being made
by a laser evaporating something it was
done by taking two carbon rods touching
them together and putting a very big
current in between them rather like an
old-fashioned carbon arc lamp that used
to be used in cinemas for projecting
films and you gave very bright light
it's very hot and some of the soot that
evaporates contains c60 and if you take
this suit this black powder looks
horrible and put it in an organic
solvent out of it you can extract a
beautiful sort of wine colored solution
and that was C 60 I'm going to
demonstrate that fullerene is a soluble
form of carbon and graphite or amorphous
carbon they are insoluble form of carbon
so I'm just going to do a solubility
test for you now it was the first new
form of carbon that had been discovered
for perhaps a thousand years or more so
I've got two beakers 100 milliliter ceej
and I'm going to put just just a little
bit of each form of carbon in this
beaker so now I'm taking is a small
amount of ordinary carbon chemically it
is interesting because you can get a
variety of reactions and my research
group did some experiments which showed
that if you heated up C 60 and made a
very fine powder from it instead of
being black look yellow I'm going to use
organic solvent called toluene and this
solvent is known to be very good for
food rings so I've got a bottle it's
very rare for chemists to get a Nobel
Prize for discovering one molecule but
this case they really deserved it why
because it changed the way that people
thought about carbon and you could do
all sorts of experiments with carbon
dissolved in solution which nobody had
ever been able to do before but this is
a particles of ordinary carbon they just
at the bottom of the beaker so there
they're not floating there they're
sinking and fullering carbon it does
pretty much the same thing so you can
see particles there as well so what we
need to do we just need to give a bit of
energy this particles well I can try a
simple thing to start with I can just
gently swirl the beaker just for the
sake of time just you know to save time
I'm going to use ultrasonic bath so this
rather simple device it's actually very
often used for cleaning jewelry rings
and earrings and so on so so what it
does it's just a bath essentially filled
with water and it when I turn it on it
makes this rather when I'm going to turn
it on the ultrasonic waves will be
moving around these particles they will
be shaking them from back and forth and
that will help the molecules in case of
the for example to mix with saw one well
it is looks black like other carbon co
graphite it is not an electrical
conductor like graphite it's not a very
good conductor of heat like diamonds and
it burns like all other carbon but it's
very expensive so the last thing you
want to do is to burn your precious
sample and it has these optical
properties it's red in solution and
nobody for before had seen red carbon
don't sleep acting like it's kind of
gray
I think the molecule itself is not
useful but people are finding more
interesting properties in the
derivatives the derivative means you add
touch other atoms to see 16 but the
other thing is important that see 60
isn't the only molecule of this type
it's the smallest one that you can
conveniently make but you can make
bigger molecules see 70 that shaped more
like a u.s. football and there's even
see 84 and several others and this year
see 60 has been discovered
spectroscopically looking the light
coming from stars so in outer space
there's a lot of Z 60 now we're going to
do the same treatment with a fooling
sample turn it on
now that's very definitely a solution
you can see it's very clear so it's not
cloudy at all
see six day has one unique thing it's
one of the few molecules that has given
rise to a new chemical symbol and the
chemical symbol is the act sign like you
use in emails and the reason why you've
got a symbol is because c60 is hollow
like you can see here and sometimes not
always you can get atoms to go inside
and before this chemists had never had a
way of describing an atom that was
inside the cage of other molecules so
for example you can put helium inside
c60 or neon or even xenon and the symbol
for this is now helium at C 60 so C 60
has a special place in chemistry because
it gave rise to this new symbol and
fullering was discovered of course it's
a round shape so the immediate idea is
to use this lubricant so you can imagine
two surfaces you can sprinkle some food
rings on these two surfaces and you can
let them move around and one fantastic
but very soon chem is discovered that
food is quite reactive so when you
squash it between two surfaces and you
apply a bit of pressure
it starts bloom rising and once
polymerized from very long chains so
it's a useless lubricant so and that's I
think it's very illustrative of the
history of the fullerenes so so you know
here is a fantastic great idea here is
what could be useful you know when we
start exploring properties of food and
we discover something new that actually
perhaps may renders this initial idea
completely useless but it opens new
avenues for reading polymers for example
could be used I think in superconductors
it can be used again in this non
electronic devices so it's I think
history food is full of this peaks and
troughs we go through and I think what
we should be grateful for getting for is
the intellectual stimulation gives us
every day in when we work in the lab