Magnetic Carbon

The present work describes all the efforts performed during a three year PhD course in the Fullerene Research group of Parma within the European FERROCARBON venture. The project financed by NEST FP6 and coordinated by our group has brought together an array of European scientific talents from Italy, Spain, Germany, Sweden, Russia and the United Kingdom with the common challenging task of achieving and understanding how to produce completely organic room-temperature ferromagnets routinely and in bulk. As a general matter, the efforts has been focused on the synthesis of new room temperature carbon based ferromagnets following substantially the two most promising systems: Fullerenes (polymeric fullerides) and Griphite (defective graphene planes).