The chemical bonds that hold together the 60 atoms of carbon in a fullerene or buckyball molecule can be tuned through the use of an applied voltage and electric current.
If the chemical bonds that hold together the constituent atoms of a molecule could be tuned to become stronger or weaker, certain chemical properties of that molecule might be controlled to great advantage for applications in energy and catalysis. Berkeley Lab researchers at the Molecular Foundry, in collaboration with researchers from Rice University, were able to accomplish this feat by using an applied voltage and electric current to tune the strength of chemical bonds in fullerene or "buckyball" molecules. The softening of the buckyball chemical bonds was revealed by measured changes in the vibrational frequencies of those bonds. "To my knowledge, this measurement is the first demonstration of controllably and reversibly softening bonds between atoms by applying a voltage and running an electric current through a single molecule," says Jeff Neaton, director of the Molecular Foundry, which is a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) nanoscience center hosted at Berkeley Lab, and a University of California (UC) Berkeley physics professor. "While the quantitative behavior we witnessed is quite specific to fullerene molecules, such control over the strength of intramolecular bonds could be used down the road to, for example, promote certain chemical reactions, identify mechanisms for device degradation and reduce dissipation mechanisms." Contrary to the popular image of chemical bonds as sticks connecting balls that represent the atoms in a molecule, a chemical bond is actually a distribution of electronic charge that bridges two or more atoms, effectively gluing them together.
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