Fullerene Polymers from Solid Precursors?

One of the many speculations that quickly followed on the heels of the Kraetschmer-Huffman process for producing large quantities of C[sub 60] buckminsterfullerene was the possibility of stitching the molecules together to create a linear chain polymer, a [open quotes]pearl necklace[close quotes] of buckyballs. In addition to being chemically elegant and intrinsically beautiful, such a material might be expected to exhibit interesting electronic and nonlinear optical properties. Traditional solution-phase routes to fullerene polymerization have thus far resulted only in mixtures of incompletely characterized species with a high degree of cross-linking. This article reviews experiments that show that this goal might be achieved by starting from a fullerene solid precursor.