US-Scientists created a molecule called cyclocarbon and imaged its structure, describing the ring of 18 carbon atoms online August 15 in Science. The work unveils a new face of one of chemistry’s most celebrated elements.
“It’s not every day that you make a new form of carbon,” says chemist Rik Tykwinski of the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, who was not involved with the research. The result had eluded chemists for so long that Tykwinski had placed a bet about whether cyclocarbon would be created and imaged. “I basically won a bottle of scotch from a friend,” he says.
Cyclocarbon joins other forms of the versatile element, including diamond, graphite, thin sheets called graphene, tiny spheres known as buckyballs and miniature cylinders called carbon nanotubes.
Chemists thought that it should be possible to create the ring-shaped molecules of carbon. But until now, nobody knew what their properties would be, says physicist Katharina Kaiser of IBM Research in Zurich. “It’s really amazing that we found it and it’s absolutely great that we could characterize it.”
In the lab, Kaiser and colleagues started with molecules of cyclocarbon oxide, which consist of carbon atoms arranged in a loop with additional carbon monoxide groups attached to the atoms. Removing the carbon monoxide to create the coveted new form of carbon is no easy task; those groups help to stabilize the molecule.