Olympicene

Olympicene is the name of a new organic carbon based molecule made up of five rings, of which four are benzene rings, joined in the shape of the Olympic rings. The molecule was conceived in March 2010 as a way to celebrate the 2012 London Olympics by Professor Graham Richards’s former head of Oxford University’s chemistry department and member of the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) council.

It was first synthesized by researchers Anish Mistry and David Fox of the University of Warwick in the UK. Recently, it was making news because the researchers have succeeded in taking a stunning image via the atomic force microscopy. Atomic Force Microscopy was developed by the IBM researchers in 1980s and the recent AFM image of Olympicene molecule, which showcased the under a billionth of a metre in size, has also been developed by researchers at IBM in collaboration with others at Zurich.