The closed shell structures of certain all-carbon fragments originally observed in mass spectroscopy experiments leads to the enhanced stability of these species, known as fullerenes, which have excited sufficient interest amongst chemists and physicists over the last decade to warrant the award of the 1996 Nobel Prize for Chemistry to their discoverers.
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Studies of the stability, symmetry, and consequent remarkable properties of fullerenes began in earnest in 1991 with the development of a technique enabling the production and purification of macroscopic quantities of material. The best known and most widely studied fullerene is the truncated icosahedral C[subscript 60] molecule, which forms the basis of the present work.
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One important property of C[subscript 60] is that it forms salts with sufficiently electropositive species, such as the alkali metals. The resulting salts contain C[subscript 60] anions and are known as fullerides. Certain of these salts display metallic behaviour, and some superconduct at temperatures as high as 33 K.
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Three aspects of fulleride research are addressed in this work. These are: i) the preparation, crystal structure determination and superconductivity characterization of several new fullerides, particularly those including ammonia as an additional intercalant; ii) the electronic structure of the C[superscript n-, subscript 60] (n = 1 - 6) anions, as probed by solution-phase near infrared absorption spectroscopy; and iii) the molecular dynamics of a number of fullerides, superconducting and non-superconducting, by inelastic neutron scattering.
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This work has grown out of an Honours project also concerning C[subscript 60], the combined duration of the two studies covering essentially the entire history of this widely and competitively studied field.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ADTP/216693 |
| Date | January 1997 |
| Creators | Fullagar, Wilfred Kelsham, w_fullagar@hotmail.com |
| Publisher | The Australian National University. Research School of Chemistry |
| Source Sets | Australiasian Digital Theses Program |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Rights | http://www.anu.edu.au/legal/copyright/copyrit.html), Copyright Wilfred Kelsham Fullagar |
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