(Invited) Anisotropic Contributions in the Chromatographic Elution Behavior of Fullerenes and Fullertubes

Since their discovery in the mid-1980s, the fullerenes have been confined to molecules of less than 100 atoms. With the recent development of a method allowing the isolation of pristine samples[1], the discovery of increasingly long fullertubes, hybrid between a fullerene and a nanotube, is stimulating renewed interest in the field of fullerene science. The increase in the number of atoms comes at a price, the explosion in the number of possible isomers, among which we must identify the experimentally isolated structure. Fuch’s model[2] is commonly used to explain the interaction between fullerenes and non-polar HPLC columns. Still, this approach cannot always differentiate between isomers as the results depend only on the average polarizability, which varies little for fullerenes with the same number of carbon atoms. In this presentation, we will discuss the use of polarizability anisotropy to differentiate isomers in the context of chromatographic elution. It allows us to generalize Fuchs’ model by adding anisotropic contributions leading to a finer description of fullerenes elution behavior and a better isomeric identification. [1] R.M. Koenig, H.-R. Tian, T.L. Seeler, K.R. Tepper, H.M. Franklin, Z.-C. Chen, S.-Y. Xie, and S. Stevenson, J. Am. Chem. Soc. 142 , 15614 (2020). [2] D. Fuchs, H. Rietschel, R.H. Michel, A. Fischer, P. Weis, and M.M. Kappes, J. Phys. Chem. 100, 725 (1996). Figure 1