Newly-designed basket-shaped nanocarbon materials as strong and universal fullerene receptors.

We introduced the host-guest chemistry of newly-designed fullerene receptors consisting of buckybowl and alkyne subunits. DFT computations indicated that the huge π-π overlap results in significant binding energy that is larger than those of other known fullerene hosts. The flexibility of the carbon skeleton ensures that corannulenes can be easily twisted to capture different guests and thus are expected as universal hosts for fullerene encapsulation.