The most familiar forms of carbon are graphite and diamond, but there are other unique nanoscale carbon allotropes such as graphene and fullerenes. These are hybridized carbon structures. sp ² with zero (flat shape) or positive (spherical) curvature.

Meanwhile sp ² Theoretically, a hybridized carbon with negative curvature called “schwarzite” has been proposed and its discovery has been the dream of some scientists working in the field of carbon materials. It has been found that carbon can be modeled into some periodic pores of certain zeolites through vapor deposition, but modeling is incomplete because some pores are too narrow. This prevented the formation of carbonaceous schwartzites in patterned ways.

Recently, a group of researchers from the Center for Multidimensional Carbon Materials at the Institute of Basic Sciences (IBS) in South Korea, led by Director Rodney Ruoff and colleagues at the University of Science and Technology of China led by Professor Yanwu Zhu, reported the discovery of a new form of carbon. .

Zhu, who led the USCT team, said: “Professor Ruoff explained his interest in the triple periodic minimal surfaces described by the mathematician Schwartz and how the trivalent carbon bond can in principle yield the same structures in mathematical structures. “carbon schwartzite,” which can now be called “negative curvature carbon.” They’re called structures. I told him years ago that it’s a fascinating research topic and that maybe we can find ways to collaborate on his proposal.”

This new carbon has been characterized by a variety of methods, and (in fact) characterization has been challenging due to the variety of slightly different “c60 broken cells” that still retain their position in the standard face-centered cubic crystal lattice. X-ray diffraction, Raman scattering spectroscopy, magic-angle solid-state nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy, aberration-corrected transmission electron microscopy, and neutron scattering have been used to understand the structure of this new form of carbon. Numerical simulations based on a kind of neural network simulation combined with the experimental methods mentioned above show that LOPC is a metastable structure formed during the conversion of “fullerene-type” carbon to “graphene” carbon.