Attraction and orientation phenomena of bucky onions formed in a transmission electron microscope

Our transmission electron microscopy study of bucky onions formed in a transmission electron microscope (TEM) showed two main phenomena: (1) the five-fold symmetry axes of icosahedral and quasi-icosahedral bucky onions are all parallel to the viewing direction, (2) the vertices at the top and bottom of the bucky onions strongly prefer to be caught by a vertex of another particle. A growth model is presented, showing that the growth of each bucky onion originates from the pentagonal rings at the top and bottom, where a locally strong ring-current paramagnetism is excited by the electron-beam irradiation and the magnetic field of the objective lens.