Our Road to Fullerenes: A Personal Account

Abstract

Carbon is the most abundant condensable element in space. Our attempts to produce interstellar-like graphitic grains unexpectedly led to the discovery of a method for fullerene production in bulk amounts. These works opened the door for an entirely new branch of materials research and carbon chemistry. Recently, fullerenes were also detected in interstellar space. Presented are the various phases and steps of our work which with intermissions lasted from 1983 to 1990. In the beginning there were unexplained UV absorptions in the soot samples we had produced, and the endpoint was marked by the extraction of fullerenes in crystalline form and in form of coated films from just these samples.