Fullerene C540]] "C60" and "C-60" redirect here. For other uses, see C60 . The Fullerenes, discovered in 1985 by Robert Curl, Harold Kroto and Richard Smalley at the University of Sussex and Rice University, are a family of carbon allotropes named after Richard Buckminster Fuller and are sometimes called buckyballs, when in a spherical configuration. They are molecules composed entirely of carbon, in the form of a hollow sphere, ellipsoid, or tube. Cylindrical fullerenes are called carbon nanotubes or buckytubes. Fullerenes are similar in structure to graphite, which is composed of a sheet of linked hexagonal rings, but they contain also pentagonal (or sometimes heptagonal) rings that prevent the sheet from being planar. Prediction and discovery In molecular beam experiments, discrete peaks were observed corresponding to molecules with the exact ma