Fullerene-Like Carbon in Nature and Perspectives of its use in Science-Based Technologies

Abstract

Carbon plays an all-important role in nature. Carbon atoms can to form complicated organic networks some of those are base for existence of known forms of life. Elemental carbon also shows very complicated behavior forming a number of different structures. Recent years have been marked by an accented interest of scientists in fullerenes, nanotubes and many nano-sized shapes ( Kroto et al., 1985 ; Iijima, 1991 ). Non-crystalline fullerene-like carbon forms were additionally obtained using an arc discharge, flame, laser pyrolysis ( Chhowalla et al., 1997 ; Mordkovich, 2000 ; Grieco et al., 2000 ), and were even found in petrol soot ( Lee et al., 2002 ). The term “fullerene-like” has been used for roughly spherical carbon structures suc carbon “onions” and hollow nanoparticles consisting of concentric curled car layers. Some authors have specified additional characteristics such as a diameter between ca. 5 and 20 nm ( Chhowalla et al., 1997 ) and a lattice spacing of approximately 0.35 nm ( Grieco et al., 2000 ). They infer the curling of graphene layers results from the presence of pentagonal rings as in fullerenes ( Grieco et al., 2000 ). Other authors assume that four- and eight-membered carbon rings can occur in fullerene structures ( Slanina et al., 1999 ). In addition, it has been hypothesized that the graphene layers contain defects in the form of pentagonal, heptagonal, or other kind of rings, singly or in combination, that affect the graphene-layer curvature and create different fullerene-like structures ( Cataldo, 2002 ).