carbon rings

It's always interesting to catch up with what Oxford chemist Harry Anderson is up to - and his latest work, characterising a new allotrope of carbon, no less, even made it onto the cover of Science:



(Note however that the cover graphic misrepresents the findings in an important way. Anderson and colleagues found that the C18 ring has alternating triple and single bonds, while the graphic suggests the bonds are all the same.)

When the paper appeared online in August, I wrote a short news story about it for Chemistry World:


New form of pure carbon made by manipulating atoms

which neatly builds on last year's story about polyyne nanowires:

Most complex reaction ever triggered by atomic manipulation creates molecular wire
.

The C18 paper in Science is here (paywalled).

And C18 has its own flickr album, too.