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Nanotechnology

Bouncing a C60 ball

Nature volume 407, pages 35–36 (2000)Cite this article

Bouncing balls fascinate not only soccer and basketball fans, but also some nanoscientists. On page 57 of this issue, Park et al.1 describe the bouncing of the smallest possible soccer ball, a C60 molecule with a diameter of 0.7 nanometres. Like all classic soccer balls, a C60 molecule consists of 12 pentagons surrounded in total by 20 hexagons2. Regardless of the ball's size, the spherical geometry always has the same number of pentagons and hexagons.

Many chemical, electronic and physical properties of C60 have been studied in the 15 years since its discovery2. The experiment by Park et al.1 adds mechanical properties to this list. They do with C60 what others do with a ball, bouncing it up and down on a surface. Controlling the motion of nanoscale objects is an important issue in the field of nanotechnology. Whereas in the macroscopic world the transfer of energy from a bouncing tennis ball to a surface is negligible, on the nanometre scale the energy of mobile electrons in the material cannot be ignored. In nanoscale objects, the coupling of electronic and mechanical behaviour can be enough to get a molecule moving, despite the much heavier mass of the molecule compared with the mass of the electron.

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Figure 1: How to build a transistor from a single C60 molecule.

References

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  2. Dresselhaus, M. S., Dresselhaus, G. & Eklund, P. C. (eds) Science of Fullerenes and Carbon Nanotubes (Academic, San Diego, 1996).

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  3. Schwab, K., Henriksen, E. A., Worlock, J. M. & Roukes, M. L. Nature 404, 974–977 ( 2000).

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  1. Department of Applied Physics and the ERATO Mesoscopic Correlations Project, Delft University of Technology, PO Box 5046, 2600, GA Delft, The Netherlands

    Leo Kouwenhoven

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  1. Leo Kouwenhoven
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Correspondence to Leo Kouwenhoven.

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Kouwenhoven, L. Bouncing a C60 ball. Nature 407, 35–36 (2000). https://doi.org/10.1038/35024197

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