"MATERIALS: 'Shrink-wrap' formation of carbon-60 observed"

When the late Harold Kroto, Robert Curl and the late Richard Smalley won the 1996 Nobel Prize for their 1985 discovery of carbon-60, they speculated on how they believed it was created. The trio called these hollow spheres of 60 carbon atoms arranged in interlocking pentagons "fullerenes," (and sometimes "buckyballs") to celebrate their resemblance to the geodesic dome invented by Buckminster Fuller. They called fullerenes' construction method "shrink wrapping," because they believed that fullerenes started out as sheets of graphene that were wrapped into giant spheres of a thousand or more atoms, then shed atoms by "evaporation" until they reached the smallest possible formation, carbon-60. Unfortunately, when Smalley died, in 2005, the shrink-wrap hypothesis had yet to be confirmed. Now, however, Sandia National Laboratories claims to have experimental confirmation
Text: http://www.eetimes.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=202800147