A New Member of the Carbon Family is Born

Chemists and physicists in Zurich have recently been successful in isolating a molecule made of 18 carbon atoms in a ring in a recent report in ScienceMag.  Cyclocarbons, carbon allotropes that are composed of two-coordinate atoms, has been difficult for scientists to isolate in the laboratory as they have high reactivity.  This makes it difficult for them to characterize the molecules.

Physicist from IBM Research in Zurich, Katharina Kaiser worked with her colleagues to make the process possible.  They utilized cyclocarbon oxide molecules, consisting of carbon monoxide groups attached to the carbon atoms arranged in a loop.  The researchers had to stabilize the molecules before removing the carbon monoxide groups.  They used an atomic force microscope and applied voltages to be able to remove the extraneous carbon monoxide groups.  This was done on a surface of inert table salt since cyclocarbon is highly reactive.

The procedure has revealed that the carbon atoms are collected in a ring with alternating single and triple bonds, which are alternately longer and shorter, respectively.  This gives the ring seemingly only nine sides.  Yves Rubin from the University of California, Los Angeles, who was not involved with the study, made a comment on how this conclusion on its structure could help explain how complex calculations used to predict the structure of some unknown molecules.  "There's still a big question whether many of these calculations give the right answer," he said, "so it's very important to confirm by experiment."

Rik Tykwinski from the University of Alberta, who was also not involved with the study, expressed his happiness with the possibility that cyclocarbon would be isolated.  "It's not every day that you make a new form of carbon," he says.  "I basically won a bottle of scotch from a friend," he added as he told a story about placing a bet on whether the molecule could be created and imaged.

Although this is a big step in the identification and characterization of cyclocarbon molecules, it still has a long way to go.  The impactful factor here is its instability.  Because of this, it cannot be easily bottled up for further observation and study.