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Wiktionary
fullerene

n. 1 (context inorganic chemistry English) 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 (context organic chemistry English) any closed-cage compound having twenty or more carbon atoms consisting entirely of 3-coordinate carbon atoms 3 (context chemistry by extension English)Th e class of carbon allotropes consisting of tubular carbon molecules (carbon nanotubes) and spheroidal carbon molecules (traditional fullerenes)

WordNet
fullerene

n. a form of carbon having a large molecule consisting of an empty cage of sixty or more carbon atoms

Wikipedia
Fullerene

A fullerene is a molecule of carbon in the form of a hollow sphere, ellipsoid, tube, and many other shapes. Spherical fullerenes are also called Buckminsterfullerenes (buckyballs), and they resemble the balls used in football (soccer). 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 (or sometimes heptagonal) rings.

The first fullerene molecule to be discovered, and the family's namesake, buckminsterfullerene (C), was prepared in 1985 by Richard Smalley, Robert Curl, James Heath, Sean O'Brien, and Harold Kroto at Rice University. The name was a homage to Buckminster Fuller, whose geodesic domes it resembles. The structure was also identified some five years earlier by Sumio Iijima, from an electron microscope image, where it formed the core of a "bucky onion". Fullerenes have since been found to occur in nature. More recently, fullerenes have been detected in outer space. According to astronomer Letizia Stanghellini, "It’s possible that buckyballs from outer space provided seeds for life on Earth."

The discovery of fullerenes greatly expanded the number of known carbon allotropes, which until recently were limited to graphite, graphene, diamond, and amorphous carbon such as soot and charcoal. Buckyballs and buckytubes have been the subject of intense research, both for their unique chemistry and for their technological applications, especially in materials science, electronics, and nanotechnology.

Usage examples of "fullerene".

It was a buckyball, a carbon fullerene molecule, the half-living, half-machine building-brick of the Chaga.

He had dragged it out of storage six days ago, and found to his surprise that it still functioned once he had cannibalized the now-useless new radio for its fullerene batteries.

The fullerenes created during those impacts sometimes trapped atoms from the original cometary material inside their lattice structures, so that when you took the fullerene apart, inside it you would have a little piece of that original cometary material.

Crusher turned away, looking at the fullerene rotating, planetlike, on her screen.

At a preprogrammed height above ground, which is determined by radar altimeters in each sub-projectile, the Indowy containment field releases a burst of anti-protons into the fullerene matrix which then sustains a rapid chain reaction.

Ten minutes later I was walking across town, past all the UN checkpoints and security points, with a vial of Chaga fullerenes slid into my vagina.

They think these fullerenes will give the edge to their industries, make the economy indestructible.

And a couple centuries ago, on Earth anyway, came the first detections of fullerenes in impact craters from meteorites and comet fragments.

When the forensics team was done sweeping the pirate vessel, there was a fairly high incidence of fullerenes found on its hull.

Venus, our folk are already delivering to your vessel phials of drugs, fabrics, and the tubular fullerenes we know your folk especially prize.

Small craft were now truly small, fullerene constructions no bigger than a few millimeters across when furled, built by even smaller machines and powered by exotic transuranium batteries.

Zafir was an expert in these little carbon geodesic spheres called buckminsterfullerenes, and he waxed enthusiastic: "Temperatures and pressures in the west Tharsis zone of the fall turned out to be similar to those used in the arc-reactor-synthesis method of making fullerenes, and so there's a hundred-kilometer stretch out there where the carbon on the bottom side of the cable consists almost entirely of buckyballs.

Combining this with the suitable use of a benzene solvent, an almost-pure mixture of fullerenes was formed.

Like lasers in 1965, five years after the first one was built, fullerenes seem to be a solution waiting for a problem.

And like lasers, fullerenes will almost certainly become enormously valuable technological tools in the next thirty years.