Boron buckyballs!
Posted: Wed Feb 06, 2008 9:36 pm
There's been some talk about how to deal with first-wall issues, especially in a D-D burning Polywell. One suggestion was to use B-10, but a possible downside of that is atomic boron is structurally weak. Here's another possibility I just came across: boron buckyballs.
Researchers at Rice University, the former home of Nobel laureate Richard Smalley, have posited the existence of B80 but have yet to actually build one.Yakobson said it is too early to speculate whether the boron buckyball will prove to be equally or more useful than its Nobel Prize-winning sibling.
"It’s too early to make comparisons," he said. "All we know is that it’s a very logical, very stable structure likely to exist.
"But this opens up a whole new direction, a whole new continent to explore. There should be a strong effort to find it experimentally. That may not be an easy path, but we gave them a good road map."
Following the paper's acceptance, there was a little debate with the journal's editors about whether or not the structure could be named "buckyball." Yakobson mentioned this to Curl.
"Bob (Curl) said with a chuckle that it was more of a ‘buckyball’ than his buckyball," Yakobson said. The reason being that C60 was named for famed architect Buckminster Fuller, because the buckyball looked like conjoined geodesic domes, a structure that Fuller had invented.
"When Fuller made his domes, he made them from triangles because hexagons would collapse," Yakobson said. "In B80, we fill the hexagon with one more atom, making triangles."