C60+C60 molecular bonding revisited and expanded

Abstract

Several dimerization products of fullerene C60 are presented and thoroughly characterized with a quantum chemical DFT model augmented by dispersion. We reanalyze and expand significantly the number of known dimers from 12 to 41. Many of the novel bonding schemes were found by analyzing more than 2 ns of high energy molecular dynamics semiempirical trajectories with AutoMeKin, a methodology previously used to compute the reactivity of much smaller molecules. For completeness, this was supplemented by structures built by different geometric considerations. Also, spin-polarization was explicitly considered yielding 12 new bonding schemes with magnetic ground states. The results are comprehensively analyzed and discussed in the context of yet to be explained 3D fullerene structures and recent fullerene 2D systems.