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Stone–Wales Transformations
Buckminsterfullerene is a molecule shaped like a soccer ball, made of 60 carbon atoms. If one of the bonds between two hexagons rotates, we get a weird mutant version of this molecule: This is an e…
• Torbjörn Björkman, Simon Kurasch, Ossi Lehtinen, Jani Kotakoski, Oleg V. Yazyev, Anchal Srivastava, Viera Skakalova, Jurgen H. Smet, Ute Kaiser and Arkady V. Krasheninnikov, Defects in bilayer silica and graphene: common trends in diverse hexagonal two-dimensional systems, Scientific Reports 3(2013), 3482. This paper also shows other interesting defects, and electron microscope pictures of how they actually look in graphene and hexagonal bilayer silica. I think it’s cool how a simple topological transformation akin to the Pachner moves shows up in chemistry!
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