All of the symmetry – Pm-3: Sr₃C₆₀

What does it look like?

Image from the space group project list https://crystalsymmetry.wordpress.com/230-2/

What is it?

Like the structures over the long weekend, today's is inspired by the space group list project. Today is the last structure in this series.Sampling though the list of 230, we arrived at number 200.

Buckyballs were a super discovery, a new form of carbon in the shape of a football. But making them useful to society relies on understanding how they interact with other atoms. Here we have a structure of buckyballs which have been crystallised with strontium atoms – which reduces their symmetry (they usually form in Fm-3m, space group number 226).

Where did the structure come from?

This structure of strontium doped buckyballs came from work by Kortan et al. published in
Chemical Physics Letters in 1994 http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0009261494004951

Tags: molecular   carbon   buckyballs