Instantons and the Buckyball

Abstract

The study of Skyrmions predicts that there is an icosahedrally symmetric charge seventeen SU(2) Yang-Mills instanton in which the topological charge density, for fixed Euclidean time, is localized on the edges of the truncated icosahedron of the buckyball. In this paper the existence of such an instanton is proved by explicit construction of the associated ADHM data. A topological charge density isosurface is displayed which verifies the buckyball structure of the instanton.