Computational Study of Tetrahedral Fullerenes Containing Fused Pentagon-Triples.

Fullerenes that violate the isolated pentagon rule are too reactive and were obtained only as endoor exohedral derivatives. Density functional theory using the B3LYP hybrid density functional was applied to investigate the electronic and structural properties of the ten smallest tetrahedral (Td or T point group) fullerenes containing four directly fused pentagon-triples. The influence of nitrogen doping and exohedral hydrogenation of the four reactive sites was also analyzed. Nucleus independent chemical shifts values computed using B3LYP/6-31G(d) are used as global and local aromaticity probe. The global strain energy is evaluated in terms of the pyramidalization (POAV) angle. The results show that the stability increases with the elimination of the energetically unfavorable strain.

Hyper-diamonds and dodecahedral architectures by tetrapodal carbon nanotube junctions.

Tetrapodal junctions are used to construct diamond-like networks and dodecahedral architectures. They can be associated with the already synthesized spongy carbon, consisting only of sp2 covalent carbon atoms, and the zeolites, periodic structures in the Euclidean space. In this paper, the structure and stability of two zigzag tetrapodal junctions are discussed. Series of objects are built up by connecting a various number of junctions. Geometry optimization and single point computations (total energy E(tot) and HOMO-LUMO gap energy E(gap)) were performed at the Hartree-Fock level of theory in view of evaluating their stability. The genus of such nanostructures was calculated from the number of consisting tetrapodal junctions.

Periodic cages.

Various cages are constructed by using three types of caps: f-cap (derived from spherical fullerenes by deleting zones of various size), kf-cap (obtainable by cutting off the polar ring, of size k), and t-cap ("tubercule"-cap). Building ways are presented, some of them being possible isomerization routes in the real chemistry of fullerenes. Periodic cages with ((5,7)3) covering are modeled, and their constitutive typing enumeration is given. Spectral data revealed some electronic periodicity in fullerene clusters. Semiempirical and strain energy calculations complete their characterization.