Superconductivity in alkali metal fullerides

The recent synthesis of macroscopic quantities of spherical molecular carbon compounds, commonly called fullerenes, has stimulated a wide variety of studies of the chemical and physical properties of this novel class of compounds. We discovered that the smallest of the known fullerenes, C60, could be made conducting and superconducting by reaction with alkali metals. In this paper, an overview of the motivation for these discoveries and some recent results are presented.