The exciting discovery of Buckminster-fullerene, C_60, during laser ablation of graphite in a pulsed jet of helium by Smalley and co-workers1, resulted in the addition of another allotrope of carbon, the third form of this element in 1985. As laser ablation method could not produce more than a few tens of thousands of this special new molecule, the electric-arc discharge method was proposed2, and this has been widely employed for large-scale preparation of fullerenes. This arc-discharge is carried out keeping the gap between the carbon electrodes at about 1 mm in an inert atmosphere and from the collected soot, the fullerenes are isolated.
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