Chicken wire (chemistry)

Most of them relate to the similarity of the regular hexagonal (honeycomb-like) patterns found in certain chemical compounds to the mesh structure commonly seen in real chicken wire.

Polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons or graphenes—including fullerenes, carbon nanotubes, and graphite—have a hexagonal structure that is often described as chicken wire-like.

[1][2][3] A hexagonal structure that is often described as chicken wire-like can also be found in other types of chemical compounds such as: The skeletal formula is a method to draw structural formulas of organic compounds where lines represent the chemical bonds and the vertices represent implicit carbon atoms.

[10][11][12] It is an old joke in chemistry to draw a polycyclic hexagonal chemical structure and call this fictional compound chickenwire.

An example is: In computational chemistry a chicken wire model or chicken wire surface plot is a way to visualize molecular models by drawing the polygon mesh of their surface (defined e.g. as the van der Waals radius or a certain electron density).