Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

The Clar Structure Of Fullerenes, Elizabeth Jane Hartung

Mathematics - Dissertations

A fullerene is a 3-regular plane graph consisting only of pentagonal and hexagonal faces. Fullerenes are designed to model carbon molecules. The Clar number and Fries number are two parameters that are related to the stability of carbon molecules. We introduce chain decompositions, a new method to find lower bounds for the Clar and Fries numbers. In Chapter 3, we define the Clar structure for a fullerene, a less general decomposition designed to compute the Clar number for classes of fullerenes. We use these new decompositions to understand the structure of fullerenes and achieve several results. In Chapter 4, …