Carbon is well known for being found in many forms, from diamond to graphene and much more.  Buckminsterfullerene – football-like molecules made of 60 carbon atoms – is of great interest to physicists and chemists working in a number of different areas.

Isosurface plot of the electronic density of the Buckminster C60 fullerene calculated by density functional theory, from C-Z Gao et al 2015 J. Phys. B: At. Mol. Opt. Phys. 48 105102

In their paper On the dynamics pf photo-electrons in C₆₀, C-Z Gao et al study theoretically the photo-electron spectra and photo-electron angular distribution of C₆₀ when ionized by ultraviolet and infrared laser pulses.  The image above shows the calculated distributions of electrons in the molecule.

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Image: Isosurface plot of the electronic density of the Buckminster C60 fullerene calculated by density functional theory techniques on a spatial grid and with non-local Goedecker-like pseudopotentials, adapted from C-Z Gao et al 2015 J. Phys. B: At. Mol. Opt. Phys. 48 105102.

Categories: Journal of Physics B: Atomic, Molecular and Optical Physics

Tags: Atomic and molecular physics, Electronic structure, Image of the week, Molecular structure, Spectroscopy