3.6.1. Overview

The extensive and crucial applications of fullerenes in science, nanotechnology and industrial research, as well as in astrophysics have motivated this study. The acceptor material used particularly in modern organic solar cells is usually a fullerene derivative [81]. Understanding the stability and degradation mechanism of organic solar cells is essential before their commercialization. Toward this end, designing polymers and fullerenes with larger electron affinity (EA) has been proposed [82]. This motivated our first ever study of the large fullerenes [83], as well as the present study to search for fullerenes with larger EAs. The rich long-lived metastable resonances that characterize the Regge pole-calculated large fullerenes TCSs, presented for the first time in [83], support the important conclusion that the experimentally detected fullerene isomers correspond to the metastable states [84] and further confirm the need to identify and delineate the resonance structures in gentle electron scattering.

The fundamental mechanism underlying atomic negative-ion catalysis was proposed by our group in the context of muon catalyzed nuclear fusion [85,86]. The mechanism involves anionic molecular complex formation in the transition state (TS), with the atomic negative-ion breaking the hydrogen bond strength. The mechanism has been demonstrated in the synthesis of H2O2 from H2O catalyzed using the Au; and Pd; anions to understand the experiments of Hutchings and collaborators [87–89], in the catalysis of light, intermediate and heavy water to the corresponding peroxides [90] and in the oxidation of methane to methanol without the CO2 emission [91]. More recently, the experiment [89] has used the less expensive atomic Sn for possible water purification in the developing world. In this context, we explored [92] the effectiveness of the fullerene anions C20 ; to C136 ; in the catalysis of water oxidation to peroxide and water synthesis from H2 and O2 hoping to find inexpensive effective negative-ion catalysts.
