Monday, December 3, 2007

Dodecahedral C20 with correct bond shape and force field

Previously, I have shown that beads with spherical shape can effectively mimic sp2 force field of fullerenes. However, these beads represent bonds instead of atoms. This may lead to confusion for students. We can avoid this problem by using beads with large aspect ratio, but the resulting structure usually has poor mechanical stability. Here Chuang has created a nice beaded fullerene of C20 (Ih) which can clearly exhibit the bond network of fullerene and at the same time possess great stability.


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