Kroto, Harry

Professor Paul O Brien, University of Manchester, UK Professor Sir Harry Kroto FRS, University of Sussex, UK Professor Harold Craighead, Cornell University, USA... 

Another form of carbon was discovered by a group of scientists in 1985. Harry Kroto,Rich SmaUey, and Bob Curl called their discovery a buckminsterfullerene, or buckybaU, named after architect Richard Buckminster Fuller (1895—1983) for the dome-shaped buildings he designed. In a buckybaU,... 

In 1985, Harry Kroto, then a professor at the University of Sussex, in England, came to Rice University in Houston, Texas, to work with Richard Smalley and Robert Curl on a project involving the chemistry of carbon-containing molecules. The researchers used a mass spectrom-... 

Harry Kroto, Richard Smalley, Robert Curl, and their colleagues discover a different form of carbon, Cgg, also known as buckminsterfullerene or buckyball. ... 

This polymorph of carbon was only discovered in 1985 by Sir Harry Kroto at the University of Sussex while looking for carbon chains. It is made by passing an electric arc between two carbon rods in a partial atmosphere of helium. Kroto was awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1996, along with two American researchers (Robert F.Curl Jr. and Richard E.Smalley). The molecule has the formula Ceo and has the same shape as a soccer ball—a truncated icosahedron it takes its name from the engineer and philosopher Buckminster Fuller who discovered the architectural principle of the hollow geodesic dome that this molecule resembles (a geodesic dome was built for EXPO 67 in Montreal). The structure is depicted in Figure 6.14. 

Series Editors F. Cataldo P. Milani Volume Editors F. Cataldo S. Iglesias-Groth Foreword by Sir Harry Kroto, Nobel Laureate... 

With a foreword by Sir Harry Kroto, Nobel Laureate... 

I thank Simon Balm and Harry Kroto for many useful comments. This work has been partly supported by NASA. 

It is interesting to note that while both Harry Kroto and Robert Curl were primarily interested in microwave spectroscopy, they published papers in the field of theoretical chemistry in the 1960s. For example, the paper by R. F. Curl Jr. and C. A. Coulson [Proc. Phys. Soc., 78,831 (1965)], Coulomb Hole in the Ground State of Two-Electron Atoms, resulted from a sabbatical year at Oxford. See also, H. W. Kroto and D. P. Santry, J. Chem. Phys., 47, 792 (1967). CNDO Molecular-Orbital Theory of Molecular Spectra. I. The Virtual-Orbital Approximation to Excited States. 

One of the most elegant classes of molecules is that of the fullerenes, which are carbon compounds in the form of hollow spheres, constructed of twelve five-sided faces and different numbers of six-sided faces. The smallest fullerene has thirty-two carbon atoms the larger ones have several hundred carbon atoms. The first fullerene was discovered in 1985, by two Americans, Richard Smalley (1943-) and Robert Curl (1933-), and an English chemist, Harry Kroto (1939-). The fullerene with sixty carbon atoms, C60, has a structure similar to the geodesic dome invented by the architect Buckminster Fuller. In a whimsical tribute, the whole class of substances was named after the American architect, and his whole name was used for C60, buckminsterfullerene, or, as it is cheerfully known, the buckyball. Fullerenes are stable and can trap other atoms or small molecules inside their spheres. We have scarcely begun to discover their potential uses. 

Harry Kroto, Istvdn Hargittai, and William Lipscomb (all three are Kentucky Colonels) at the reception of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences during the centennial Nobel celebration in Stockholm, December 2001 (photograph by M. Hargittai). 

If organic chemistry is considered to be the chemistry of carbon , then inorganic chemistry is the chemistry of all elements except carbon. In its broadest sense, this is true, but of course there are overlaps between branches of chemistry. A topical example is the chemistry of the fuller-enes (see Section 13.4) including Ceo (see Figure 13.5) and C70 this was the subject of the award of the 1996 Nobel Prize in Chemistry to Professors Sir Harry Kroto, Richard Smalley and Robert Curl. An understanding of such molecules and related species called nanotubes involves studies by organic, inorganic and physical chemists as well as by physicists and materials scientists. 

In 1985, Richard E. Smalley (1943-2005), Robert E Curl, Jr. (1933-), and Harry W. Kroto (193 9-) made the startling discovery of the soccer-ball-like (named informally buckminsterfullerene, after the architect-engineer Buckminster Fuller, and often called buckyball for short). By the end of the decade, buckyball was available in quantity and a related class of buckytubes started to play a major role in the rapidly developing field of nanotechnology. Smalley, Curl, and Kroto would share the 1996 Nobel Prize in chemistry. 

The discovery of buckminsterftillerene, for example, shows several of the components of the way research in chemistry proceeds. The researchers at Rice University who discovered C o, led by Richard Smalley and Robert Curl, had already established the ability to study other elemental clusters, or small clumps of atoms. In doing so, they constructed sophisticated and unique instruments to generate small, gas-phase clusters as well as to detect their existence and measure the number of atoms in each cluster. When Harry Kroto visited the Smalley laboratories and suggested that they study carbon, there was no expectation that they would soon discover an entirely new field. Then they noticed that the experimental peak associated with a 60-atom carbon cluster, or C o, was unusually large. They decided to optimize the production of this species and attempted to explain its apparent unusual stability. Once they annormced the discovery, other scientists repeated and extended the studies, and 5 years later, physicists at the University of Arizona discovered a means to make macroscopic quantities of C o and other... 

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