Solar Panels and fullerenes

I have been, again, visiting grad schools and listening to pitches from various professors. The work inspiring this article was Dr. Rubin's at UCLA.

Fullerenes are structures of pure carbon which take the form of specific geometric shapes. Carbon nanotubes are fullerenes with a cylindrical shape. Buckminterfullerenes (buckyballs)were the first fullerenes discovered, and the most common. What makes fullerenes interesting is that they're typically quite large, and that this size allows them to take on unusual properties.

Buckyballs in particular are good conductors, presumably because of what's essentially an enormous aromatic system. They are used or are proposed to be used in solar panels to assist in charge separation.

Solar panels work by having light hit some active surface and creating a dipole. If the two halves of the dipole can be conducted away from each other quickly then it's possible to create a voltage and a current. Most of the time, though the two charges will quickly recombine and no current will be created.

Dr. Rubin has proposed to create, rather than carbon nanotubes, chains of buckyballs. The metaphor he used was stacked shuttlecocks (from badminton). He modifies the buckyballs so that they have a variety of structures protruding from one side of them. If the process is done correctly, another buckyball should be able to fit into the slot between the tails. If the fit is close enough, then conduction between the two buckyballs should be fairly easy. Imagine enough of these structures stacked up, and what you have is essentially a nanoscale wire.

I just thought it was a cool idea.