Short summary of zome-type superbuckyball part III: Polyhedra

In this post I will present some other polyhedra built with the same principle. As you might know that the C20 and the C60 discussed in the previous post are exactly regular dodecahedron and the truncated icosahedron (an Archimedean polyhedron).

Cube⊗C60 with g=1: C624

I'd like to note that the symmetry of this structure belongs to the Th point group, although it looks as if it's got a higher symmetry of octahedral group. This is so because of the fact that locally there is only C2 rotational symmetries along each of the joining tubes. And there is no C4 rotational symmetry, not only in this structure but also in all other structures constructed with the golden ratio field where zometool is based on.

Icosahedron⊗C60 with g=2: C1560

I've posted a closely related high-genus structure quite some time ago using a different algorithm. There I treated the construction of high-genus fullerenes by replacing the faces of the underlying polyhedra by some carefully truncated inner part of a toroidal CNT. As suggested by Bih-Yaw that the current scheme of constructing superfullerenes is one another aspect of high-genus fullerene. Previously we are "puncturing holes" along the radial direction and connecting an inner fullerene with an outer one. Here we break and connect fullerenes in the lateral directions. Although topologically they are identical, as you can see the actual shapes of the resulting super-structures are quite different.

For your convenience I repost the structure here for comparison:

The construction of (regular) tetrahedron and octahedron requires the use of green struts. For now I have not come up with the corresponding strategy for green strut yet. We will move on to other polyhedra in the rest of this post.

Small Rhombicosidodecahedron⊗C60 with g=1: C5040

This Archimedean solid is of special interest since the ball of zometool is exactly it. The squares, the equilateral triangles, and the regular pentagons correspond directly to C2, C3, and C5 rotational axes, respectively. The existence of this superfullerene guarantees the possibility of building hierarchy of Sierpinski superbuckyballs. In other words, this superbuckyball can serve as nodes of a "supersuperbuckyball", with the connecting strut automatically defined. Although we are likely to stop at the current (second) level because of physical limitations, either using beads, zometool, or even just computer simulations.

Rhombic triacontahedron⊗C60 with g=1: C3120

You need red struts only for this structure.

Five compound cubes⊗C60 with g=(0,1): C6000

You need blue struts with two different lengths for this structure, which is the reason why the g factor is a two component vector here. Note that at each level the length of the strut (measured from the center of the ball at one end to the center of the other) is inflated by a factor of golden ratio. Thus, comparing to other superfullerenes introduced previously, there is additional strain energy related to the commensurability of the lengths of CNTs. It is always an approximation to use a CNT of certain length to replace the struts of a zometool model. It is also interesting to note that, comparing to the zometool model, this particular superbuckyball makes clear reference to the encompassing dodecahedron. In this perspective it is not surprising that the structure has Ih symmetry.

Dual of C80⊗C60 with g=2: C5880

This structure is obtained by inflating each of the equilateral triangles of a regular icosahedron to four equilateral triangles. An equivalent way of saying this is "inflation with Goldberg vector (2,0)".

In addition to the above mentioned, Dr. George Hart has summarized some of the polyhedra construtable with zometool here. In principle they can all be realized, at least on computers or with beads and threads, by this methodology. And there is going to be one last post in this series to cover those that are not classifiable into categories discussed so far.