Buckyballs (C60) - Periodic Table of Videos

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

Channel: Periodic Videos

Views: 402,227

Keywords: carbon

Id: ljF5QhD5hnI

Length: 9min 29sec (569 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 10 2010