Synthesis of water-soluble fullerene and its isolation

We report a new and simple method to synthesize water-soluble fullerenes. Here, the fullerene oxides are simply boiled in alkali aqueous solution to obtain water-soluble species. The mass spectrometer of water-soluble sample confirmed the presence of C-60 suggesting the dissolution of the same in water. However, the fourier transform infrared (FT-IR) and ultraviolet-visible (UV-VIS) analysis suggested that the solution contains numerous species and their properties were different to that of C-60. To study the properties of water-soluble species in detail, the isolation using high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) was attempted. The HPLC analysis of the products suggested the presence of several species of water-soluble fullerene derivatives and in most of the peaks, the presence of C-60 was confirmed. The results of the UV-VIS analysis confirmed the separation of soluble species by HPLC.