| Institution: | (1) Department of Chemistry, New Jersey Institute of Technology, Newark, New Jersey 07102, USA, US;(2) Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, New Jersey Institute of Technology, Newark, New Jersey 07102, USA, US;(3) Department of Physics, Berea College, Berea, Kentucky 40404, USA, US;(4) Department of Materials Science and Istituto Nazionale per la Fisica della Materia, University of Milano-Bicocca, 20125 Milano, Italy, IT;(5) Center for Solid State Science, Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona 85287, USA, US;(6) Army Research and Engineering Center, Picatinny, New Jersey 07806, USA, US;(7) JDS Uniphase Corp, Eatontown, New Jersey 07724, USA, US;(8) Department of Materials Science and Engineering, Royal Institute of Technology, 10044 Stockholm, Sweden, SE |
| Abstract: | Evidence is presented for the formation of a solid phase based on the smallest fullerene, C20, in thin diamond-like carbon films deposited by ultraviolet laser ablation from diamond onto nickel substrates at room temperature
in the presence of 10-4 torr of cyclohexane or benzene. Laser desorption mass spectrometry from the films shows the presence of C20, C21 and C22 species, while micro-Raman spectroscopy and electron diffraction from selected particles together with first principle density-functional
calculations, indicate a cubic solid with dodecahedral C20 cages as building blocks. Unlike solid C60 and fully protonated C20, which are bound by van der Waals forces, the proposed structure is stabilized by linking of the C20 dodecahedra with bridging carbon atoms at interstitial tetrahedral sites to form a face-centered-cubic lattice with 22 carbon
atoms per unit cell.
Received 10 October 2002 / Received in final form 24 December 2002 Published online 6 March 2003
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ID="a"e-mail: zafar.iqbal@njit.edu |
