Shrink wrap buckyball

The birth secret of buckyballs -- hollow spheres of carbon no wider than a strand of DNA -- has been caught on tape by researchers at Sandia National Laboratory and Rice University. An electron microscope video and computer simulations show that "shrink-wrapping" is the key; buckyballs start life as distorted, unstable sheets of graphite, shedding loosely connected threads and chains until only the perfectly spherical buckyballs remain.

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[FluffyJay1]

This video created a new term: Eye Fuck.

[wannabeastarrover]

o.O

[IXIericERICericIXI]

what the fuck was that

[kateelynn97]

Huh?

[NanoClips]

very beautifully made... excellent TEM work... nice!

[newton2013]

"Wicked cool stuff" is an understatement.

[buddyzee]

So, shrink wrapping makes half of them disappear suddenly? How about an explanation guy

[agaricx]

Extreme heat applied through the carbon nanotube via electric current causes formation of a single layer graphene sheet. You can see it in the video. Maintaining that level of heat causes carbon to continuously be broken off by evaporation, eventually reaching the minimal threshold of spherical C60. Hence the 'shrink wrapping'. Since heat was still being applied, the C60 was further fragmented and disappeared.

Wicked cool stuff from Rice.

[jimbot72]

I see two circles forming, then one of them dissappears, the other one shrinks and then dissappears. Are these shrinking circles supposed to be hollow shperes or carbon? And why did one of them dissappear?

[mawdervaart]

The footage shows how buckyballs, or C60 fullerenes, form in a new process where a thin sheet of graphite exposed to high temperatures shrinks and loses carbon atoms