Form of carbon, made up of molecules (buckyballs) consisting of 60 carbon atoms arranged in 12 pentagons and 20 hexagons to form a perfect sphere. It was named for the US architect and engineer Richard Buckminster Fuller because of its structural similarity to the geodesic dome that he designed. See fullerene.
Buckminsterfullerene can be made into stable polymers using palladium. In 1993 French and Russian chemists created a superhard material by crystallizing buckminsterfullerene at very high pressure. The material is able to scratch diamond and so is at least as hard.
A spherical fullerene C60 that is an extremely stable form of pure carbon, consists of interconnected pentagons and hexagons suggestive of the geometry of a geodesic dome, and is believed to be a major constituent of soot.