We live in the carbon age. No other element has proven as versatile or indispensable. Carbon has fueled our industries and transport systems and helps make up such useful and ubiquitous materials as plastics and metallurgical composites. Carbon-based oil, coal, and graphite are among the world’s most important commodities.
Despite the importance of that humble element, scientists still have much to learn about the fundamental mechanisms by which carbon interacts with itself and other elements. Even carbon–carbon interactions yield a host of compounds, each with unique properties arising from its unique geometry. Those compounds, composed of the same single element but differing in atomic arrangement, are called allotropes. The best known among the carbon allotropes are diamond and graphite, which are depicted in figure 1 along with some relative newcomers to the list: graphene, fullerenes, and carbon nanotubes, all of which were synthesized in the laboratory. Those novel synthetic allotropes...
