groups and the buckyball - ucsd mathematics.pdf

Groups and the Buckyball Fan R. K. Chung , Bertram Kostant and Shlomo Sternberg 1 Introduction The purpose of this article is to collect a number of remarkable group theoretical facts having to do with icosahedral symmetry. Some of these have been already applied to the discovery and identification of the new C60 carbon molecule, called the Buckminsterfullerene, or buckyball, for short, and we hope that other results described here will find applications in physical properties of these molecules. We begin with a description of the molecule. Take the regular icosahedron. It has twelve vertices with five edges ema- nating from each vertex, so thirty edges and twenty faces. If we truncate each vertex so as to get a pentagon, each of the (triangular) faces of the icosahedron becomes a hexagon. (They become regular hexagons if we truncate each vertex one third of the way along each edge.) Doing so, we obtain a figure with 60 vertices, each vertex has three emanating edges, two of which lie in pentagonal directions and the third is an edge of the hexagon. This is the buckyball. The icosahedral group, I , is the group of rotational symmetries of this figure which has 60 vertices, twelve pentagonal faces and twenty hexagonal faces so 32 faces. It has 5 × 12 = 60 pentagonal edges (the pentagons do not touch one another) and each hexagon has three edges which are not pentagonal, but shared with an adjacent hexagon so 20 × 3/2 = 30 such edges, so 90 edges in all. The Euler formula can be easily checked: 32 − 90 + 60 = 2. The group I acts transitively on the space of vertices of the icosahedron, and 2kπ the isotropy subgroup of each vertex consists of rotations through angles 5 . Thus on the buckyball this subgroup is the isotropy group of a pentago