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Croatica Chemica Acta, Vol. 79 No. 3, 2006.

Original scientific paper

On Instability of Fullerene C72

Damir Vukičević
Ivan Gutman
Milan Randić

Full text: english pdf 249 Kb

page 429-436

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Abstract

The most important fullerene is buckminsterfullerene C60, obtained by leap-frog transformation of the fullerene C20. The second smallest fullerene obtained by leap-frog transformation is C72 (obtained from C24). It is surprising that C72 is unstable. The standard explanation of this fact is based on steric strain resulting from the existence of two hexagons, each surrounded by 6 hexagons. By analyzing the p-electron content, it is demonstrated that these hexagons show some »pentagon-like« behavior that may be the cause (or an additional cause) of the instability of C72. Hence, it is shown that there may be topological (non-steric) reasons for the instability of C72.

Keywords

leap-frog transformation; fullerene graph; p-electron content; degree of freedom; conjugated cycles; independent conjugated cycles

Hrčak ID:

5646

URI

https://hrcak.srce.hr/5646

Publication date:

12.11.2006.

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