Published online by Cambridge University Press: 26 February 2011
It is possible to make perfect conical carbon nanostructures fundamentally different from the other nanocarbon materials, notably buckyballs and nanotubes. Carbon cones are realized in five distinctly different forms. They consist of curved graphite sheets formed as open cones with one to five carbon pentagons at the tip with successively smaller cone angles, respectively. The nucleation and physics of nanocones has been relatively little explored until now. We present here the key facts and latest results on this “5’th form of carbon”.