buckyball - 04Sep2010

A fullerene is any molecule composed entirely of carbon, in the form of a hollow sphere, ellipsoid, or tube. Spherical fullerenes are also called buckyballs, and 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 to be discovered, and the family's namesake, buckminsterfullerene (C60), was prepared in 1985 by Richard Smalley, Robert Curl, James Heath, Sean O'Brien, and Harold Kroto at Rice University. The name was an 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 (if rarely) in nature.

富勒烯是完全由碳組成的中空的球型、橢圓型、柱型或管狀分子的總稱。富勒烯（Fullerene，又譯作福樂烯），又名巴基球或巴克球（Buckyball），其他名稱還有球碳與芙，是於1985年發現的繼金剛石和石墨之後碳元素的第三種晶體形態。其中柱狀或管狀的分子又叫做碳納米管或巴基管。碳60(C60)和碳70(C70)是最常見的，也是能夠量產的富勒烯

wiki : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fullerene
中文 : http://zh.wikipedia.org/zh-hk/%E5%AF%8C%E5%8B%92%E7%83%AF