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.

Beads with long aspect ratio

In the previous post, I shown two beautifully dual beaded models made by Chuang, which give an interesting application of beads with long aspect ratio. Due to the color of these beads, the contrast of these photos is not good. I made scanned images for these two new beaded models. The contrast seems to be better than the photo.




Previously, we have used this kind of beads to made a model of C₆₀. The resulting structure is quite flexible and can be deformed easily under external stress. We claimed that beads with long aspect ratio is not suitable for constructing stable fullerenes. Now Chuang discovered that these beads are good for creating their dual structures. The rigidity of resulting structures are very large.

Dual of Beaded Molecules: C60 and T120

These couple of days I have been thinking about the usage of the rice-shaped beads we bought a long time ago when I just began to make beaded molecules. I realized at that time that they are not good materials for endurable beaded molecules since the structure is not stable usually. But it turns out that this kind of beads are quite suitable for constructing the duals of fullerenes. Take a look at the following two dual models, one for C60 and the other for T120, created by Chuang.







These dual beaded molecules have pretty good mechanical strength due to, in my speculation, the tensegrity of such structures.