The most well-known forms of carbon include graphite and diamond, but there are other more exotic nanoscale allotropes of carbon as well. These include graphene and fullerenes, which are sp2 ...

Natural diamond, seen here, has a cubic packing structure. But a much rarer form of diamond has hexagonal packing and has now ...

Technical Terms Allotropes: Different structural forms of the same element, in this case carbon, that exhibit distinct arrangements and bonding patterns.

This new form of carbon was produced using C60 fullerene (buckminsterfullerene, also called ‘buckyball molecules’) powder, as base material.

Yet that’s only part of carbon’s story. Its physical properties vary widely with the allotropic form: graphite is opaque and black, while diamond is highly transparent.