The story of making fullerenes

Abstract

Carbon is the most abundant condensable element in space. Our attempts to produce interstellar-like graphitic grains unexpectedly led to the discovery of a method for fullerene production in bulk amounts. These works opened the door for an entirely new branch of materials research and carbon chemistry. Here I present the various phases and steps of our work which, with interludes, lasted from 1983 to 1990. The starting point was the discovery of unexplained UV absorptions in the soot samples we had produced, while the endpoint was marked by the extraction of fullerenes in crystalline form from just these samples.