Shrink wrap buckyball

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

"Wicked cool stuff" is an understatement.

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

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.

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?

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

amazing video.....but wat happened to those balls....did they dissolve with the environment or evaporated..what....

video of atoms in action- amazing!

According to the article at ScienceDaily "Experiments, Simulations Reveal Birth Secret Of Buckyballs" says that they are sheets of graphite evenly heated uniformly in a nanotube and what you're seeing is proof of the heat birth method of buckyball formation.