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Originally Posted by Gary Hamilton
Well now I really feel dumb. I had not idea what "endohedral metallofullerenes" was. So I googled and I STILL do not know what it is and as a matter of fact I did not know what most of the words were in the abstract. Thanks Darren, now I have something to do tonight.
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Warning: non-knife related content.
Don't let all the technical jargon get to you...
All they are are C60 molecules with metal atoms captured inside of them so to speak. You take 60 carbon atoms and arrange them into a truncated icosahedron configuration (much like a soccer ball shape) and that gives you C60 or Buckministerfullerene. If you dope a carbon pellet with the right concentration of certain metal atoms and then hit it with a high power laser in a vacuum tube furnace at high temperatures and collect the resultant residue, you'll get a spectrum of fullerene molecules (C60, C70, C84, etc...) and if the conditions were right, you'll get some with the metal atoms trapped inside the carbon cage of the truncated icosahedron. There are other ways to make them, but I did a lot of work in pulsed laser deposition a few years ago....and hence, used a vacuum tube furnace for some of the work much like what Robert showed above.
Fullerenes and their kin, carbon nanotubes, are all the rage these days in nanotech research fields. Interesting side-note...some guys (Smalley, Kroto, et al.) were awarded the nobel prize for discovering C60 back in 1985 (I think that was the year)... but my research professor had actually seen them in some time of flight mass spectrometry experiments he had done some 10 years or so earlier...but never published it...if only he had, maybe he would have been on the list too... I guess sometimes serendipity rules...
Knife-related content:
That's a nice furnace Robert, and with the calibration offset you've established it should be quite useful. If you wanted to set it up so it would have the capability for ramp rates and soak times you could always retrofit it with a PID or fuzzy logic type controller and make it even more useful!
-Darren