Thursday, September 9, 2010

Boron buckyball: B80

I noticed a few research articles and a news report about the Boron buckyball in Science News today. This reminds me the article (The Wonderful World of Beaded Molecules, in chinese) I wrote two years ago about the potential molecules that may have the same structures as the dual structures Chuang constructed. In that article, I suggested the possible candidates should be boron clusters. Well I was not exactly right, but I was not that far away either. In the reports I read today, the smallest boron cage seems to be B80, not the structure I posted before.




The structure of B80 is very similar to that of C60. The main difference is that all hexagons in the C60 are replaced by six equilateral triangles.


(Phys. Rev. B 80, 033410, 2009)

Here is the bead model I made for this molecule. It is quite difficult to make penta- or hexa-valent local structures with rod-like beads, though. This model is not stable.
Maybe, I should try to make another one with rice-shaped beads, But I am not sure that will help.

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