Scientists at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom announced that a laboratory called Designer Carbon Materials is producing embedded fullerenes and is selling 200 micrograms for a whopping $32,000.
Endofullerenes, first discovered in 1985, are spherical structures composed of carbon atoms. Nicknamed "Buckyball" because of its shape. 60 carbon atoms form a cavity structure like a spherical cage, and there is a non-metal atom or simple molecule in the cavity, such as nitrogen, phosphorus and helium.
Endofullerenes with embedded nitrogen atoms are difficult to produce, separate, and preserve, so they are particularly expensive. The production of this kind of molecule is very difficult, and it is generally prepared by bombarding C60 with nitrogen ions at room temperature. Most nitrogen ions either cannot break the C60 carbon cage, or break the carbon cage, and only a few have the right energy. Only the right nitrogen atom can break the carbon cage, just exhaust the energy of the nitrogen ion, and then the carbon cage can repair itself, and then the nitrogen embedded fullerene can be obtained; and the produced nitrogen embedded is less than 1/10,000 It is also an extremely difficult task to separate and purify fullerenes from other C60.
Finally, fullerenes with embedded nitrogen atoms are less stable and difficult to preserve. "A single nitrogen atom is very easy to be active. If it is not protected by the carbon cage of fullerene C60, it will react with other substances in an instant, so it is an extremely unstable free radical.
Since 2001, Dr. Kyriakos Porfyrakis, the founder of Oxford Carbon Materials Design Company and a nanomaterial scientist, has been working on producing this material.
In March 2013, Professor Yang Shangfeng's research group from the School of Chemistry and Materials Science, University of Science and Technology of China and Hefei National Laboratory for Physical Science at the Microscale, Professor Lu Xing's group from the School of Materials Science and Engineering, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, and Professor Chen Zhongfang from the Univ. of Puerto Rico in the United States The group cooperated with the group of Professor Takeshi Akasaka of the University of Tsukuba, Japan, to discover and separate and characterize a new structure of fullerene, which changed the understanding of the fullerene structure that has been recognized for more than 20 years in the fullerene community.
In March 2015, Professor Yang Shangfeng's research group successfully synthesized and separated and characterized a new structure-embedded fullerene that has been considered "inseparable" due to its low stability for more than ten years. A gap in the field of embedded fullerene research, experimentally proved the possibility of isolating new structural fullerenes with low stability. The research results were published in the important international chemical journal "Journal of the American Chemical Society".