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NEWS finally score as Nobel committee honours

London. The Nobel committee last week regarded as the conceptual beginning of C6 might well have stayed the curiosity it gave the answer to a favourite topic of spec­ fullercne science.) remained for the next five years if physicists ulation at conferences for several In contrast, Robert Haddon, one of the Wolfgang Kratschmer, Don Huffman and years: when would the chemistry prize be team at Bell Laboratories in New Jersey their respective students Kosta Fostiropou­ awarded for the discovery that who discovered superconducting C60 com­ los and Lowell Lamb had not found a way to atoms can assemble into the C60 carbon pounds in 1991, feels that the prize "could make the compound in gram quantities in cages of - and who have been awarded by the end of 1991, when 1990. It was this discovery that allowed would win it? it was clear that fullerenes would change science to blossom. Both questions have now been answered, organic chemistry and materials science". There is no question that fullerenes have the second with the decision to award the The question of 'who' was the hardest, as provided entertainment for scientists and prize to Sir of the UK Univer­ the route from discovery to worldwide non-scientists alike. But how important are sity of (bottom right), and Robert impact has involved many significant contri­ they? Kroto feels that the Nobel committee Curl and of Rice Univer­ butions. But no award would have made have taken "a gamble that fullerenes will be sity in Houston, Texas (right). sense that omitted Kroto, Smalley or Curl. one of the biggest things in the 21st cen­ The discovery of buckminsterfullerene, " tury". In Haddon's view, the significance named after the American architect Buck­ i is in fundamental, not applied, science. minster Fuller, who used similar geodesic ~ "It's the kind of fundamental break- "-• domes to construct large-scale structures, ' through in chemistry of the kind we don't was made at in 1985 during ~ really see any more," he says. experiments to investigate carbon clusters Curl is confident that technological formed by laser ablation of graphite. uses will come in the next few decades.

That the discovery of C60 would one day But he suggests that the most telling fac­ earn Nobel recognition has been widely tor now is that fullerenes illustrate "the regarded as inevitable. It is hard to identify interplay of [molecular] topology and any other recent finding in chemistry that structure". Fullerene science has led to has stimulated such intense and the discovery of a host of materials, car­ diverse activity throughout the bon-based and otherwise, whose atomic­ physical sciences. scale structure dictates particular Organic chemists have liter­ nanoscale shapes and forms. ally found a new dimension for Carbon nanotubes, discovered in 1991, synthesis in C60's spherical topol­ Robert Curl (above left), his are the most celebrated example: tubes of ogy. Solid-state physicists have colleague Richard Smalley ( on graphite-like carbon a few nanometres in scaled new heights in molecular screen behind model), and Harry diameter whose closed end caps are curved superconductivity. Films of solid Kroto (below right) featured on by the same five-membered-ring defects Nature's front page (left) in 1985 C60 doped with alkali metals are that induce the curvature of the C61i cage. with their report of a discovery Smalley agrees that "the utility of C is superconducting at up to 33 that has transformed knowledge 60 degrees kelvin, 20 K above the of nanoscale carbon structures. in what it has taught us about nanoscale previous record for a molecular carbon structures" - namely that the superconductor. Kroto's interest in long-chain carbon graphite sheet "is a pretty cool thing".

C6Q exhibits novel tribological effects and molecules, called polyynes, as the source of Fullerenes may turn out to be not so much promising nonlinear optical properties, and features in the microwave spectra of inter­ an end in themselves as the beginning of a is a candidate for the carrier of unexplained stellar clouds stimulated the experiments at new view of materials science at the inter­ features in astronomical spectra. "It has Rice, where Curl introduced Kroto to the face of the molecular and the bulk scales. completely changed our perspective on car­ laser-ablation apparatus that he and Smalley Philip Ball bon chemistry," says Kroto. were using to study clusters. The question was never so much whether The experiments on graphite were initi­ C would win a as when, and - ated to look at clusters of up to around 33 m~st of all - for whom. David Jones, a atoms, which were expected to be linear at the University of Nottingham, chain molecules. C60 and the other cage-like says he had expected that the award might fullerenes were an unexpected by-product. be given "only when C60 turned out to be of The peculiar stability of C60 posed a puzzle some use". that demanded explanation. But commercial applications remain But perfecting the conditions required for remote, and Jones considers that C6 and the optimal C611 formation was a task performed related carbon-cage clusters coflectively by graduate students Jim Heath and Sean called fullerenes have so far done little of O'Brien (and also initially Yuan Liu and practical value "other than providing enter­ Qing-ling Zhang) at Rice University. Heath tainment". (Jones's speculations about a and O'Brien co-authored with Kroto, Curl curved form of graphite in his Daedalus col­ and Smalley the 1985 paper that reported umn in New Scientist in 1966 are commonly the discovery (see Nature 318, 162: 1985).

NATURE · VOL 383 · 17 OCTOBER 1996 561

© 1996 Nature Publishing Group