The formation mechanism of fullerene

Although tremendous advances in fullerene sciences have been achieved since the first discovery of fullerene in the middle of 1980’, the formation of these all-carbon cages still remains a mystery. Based on available experimental and computational evidences, some interpretations responsible for fullerene formation have been suggested in literatures. Most of them can be classified as bottom-up, top-down or size-up/size-down models. Suffering from limitation of powerful evidences, however, most of them still require validation. Herein we review the most important hypothetic fullerene formation models that have been proposed to date.