Silvery fullerene in Ag nanosaucer.

Despite the discovery of a series of fullerenes and a handful of noncarbon clusters with the typical topology of -C, the smallest fullerene with a large degree of curvature, C, and its other-element counterparts are difficult to isolate experimentally. In coinage metal nanoclusters (NCs), the first all-gold fullerene, Au, was discovered after a long-lasting pursuit, but the isolation of similar silvery fullerene structures is still challenging. Herein, we report a flying saucer-shaped 102-nuclei silver NC () with a silvery fullerene kernel of Ag, which is embraced by a robust cyclic anionic passivation layer of (KPO). This Ag kernel can be viewed as a non-centered icosahedron Ag encaged into a dodecahedron Ag, forming the silvery fullerene of Ag@Ag. The anionic layer (KPO) is located at the interlayer between the Ag kernel and Ag shell, passivating the Ag silvery fullerene and templating the Ag shell. The BuPhS and CFCOO ligands on the silver shell show a regioselective arrangement with the 60 BuPhS ligands as expanders covering the upper and lower of the flying saucer and 10 CFCOO as terminators neatly encircling the edges of the structure. In addition, shows excellent photothermal conversion efficiency () from the visible to near-infrared region ( = 67.1% ± 0.9% at 450 nm, 60.9% ± 0.9% at 660 nm and 50.2% ± 0.5% at 808 nm), rendering it a promising material for photothermal converters and potential application in remote laser ignition. This work not only captures silver kernels with the topology of the smallest fullerene C, but also provides a pathway for incorporating alkali metal (M) into coinage metal NCs via M-oxoanions.