You haven’t heard from Rice scientists lately, so let’s take care of that as we start a new week.
Dr. Boris Yakobson and his team in the Mechanical Engineering & Materials Science department have come up with a conceptual framework for a Boron Buckyball. (Boron, for those unfamiliar with it, has the atomic number of 5. It sits on your periodic table snugly between berylium and carbon, and is structurally most similar to aluminum.
But here’s the thing. When the team ran its numbers for a Boron-60
ball, they found it didn’t work. It wasn’t structurally sound.
So they came up with the design at right, which adds an extra boron
atom in the center of each hexagonal structure, creating B80.
The fun part of this is that the extra structure also makes the
underlying framework closer to the geodesic dome design of R. Buckminster
Fuller himself (as seen in the old Houston Astrodome) than the
soccer-ball like C60. (Yakobson ran his design by Robert Curl, Nobel Prize winner for the original Buckyball, who agreed with me on this point.)
Hence, a Buckier Buckyball. No idea yet as to its physical properties.
No one has yet even created an experiment to create it, or find it. But
it is a whole new structural world, which is always a fun place to go
to.
Now, Doc, since you have imagined a Boron Buckyball, is it theoretically possible
to replicate the same structure for aluminum? We have lots of aluminum.
