The structure of C60 is a truncated (T = 3) icosahedron, which resembles a football of the kind made of twenty hexagons and twelve Pentagon, with a carbon atom at the nodes in each polygon and a bond along each edge of polygon.
Van der Waals diameter of a C60 molecule is about 1 nanometer (nm). The core of the core diameter of a C60 molecule is about 0.7 nm.
The C60 molecule has two bond lengths. The 6:6 ring bonds (between two hexagons) can be considered "double bonds" and are shorter than the 6:5 bonds (between a hexagon and a pentagon). Its average bond length is 1.4 angstroms.
Boron buckyball
A new type of bucky ball uses boron atoms instead of the usual carbon has been predicted and described by researchers at Rice University. B-80 structure is expected to be more stable than the C 60 bucky ball. One reason for this, which the researchers is that the B-80 is actually more like the original geodesic dome structure popularized by Buckminster Fuller, using triangles rather than hexagons. But this work has been the subject of much criticism by quantum chemists As it was concluded that the expected Ih vibrationally symmetric structure was unstable and the resulting cage undergoes a spontaneous symmetry breaking gives a puck cage with rare Th symmetry (symmetry in volleyball) The number of six rings of carbon in this molecule is 20 and the number of five member rings is 12.Variations of buckyballs
Another fairly common buckminsterfullerene is C70,but fullerenes with 72, 76, 84 and even up to 100 carbon atoms are commonly obtained.
In mathematical terms, the structure of a fullerene is a trivalent convex polyhedron with pentagonal and hexagonal faces. In graph theory, the term fullerene refers to any 3-regular, planar graph with all faces of size 5 or 6 (including the external face). It follows from Euler's polyhedron formula, |V|-|E|+|F| = 2, (where |V|, |E|, |F| indicate the number of vertices, edges, and faces), that there are exactly 12 pentagons in a fullerene and |V|/2-10 hexagons.
