Quick facts
turn: “Buckyballs” were discovered and described.
date: November 14, 1985
where: Rice University, Houston, Texas
from: Harry Croteau, Richard Smalley, and Robert Curl
During a frenetic ten-day period in 1985, scientists conceived a new molecule with perfect symmetry, and named it after one of the most famous inventors and futurists of the 20th century.
But radio and optical data from this interstellar medium indicate that there is more Long carbon chains Which should have been possible in light of astrophysics Molecular synthesis theories of the time. Scientists began to wonder whether cooling red giant stars were pumping the interstellar medium full of these six to eight carbon chains.
The eureka moment for Croteau was a visit to Rice University laboratories by chemists Robert Corll and Richard Smalley. Smalley had a special device that vaporized a laser beam Atoms On the surface of a metal disk, then swept them into a helium cloud and vacuum to cool them, and finally analyzed their makeup with another laser.
Croto began to wonder if they could mimic the outer shells of the cold red giants by replacing the metal disk with a disk made of graphite, a form of carbon.
During the first 10 days of September, the trio, along with graduate students Sean O’Brien and Jim Heath, produced chains of six to eight carbon chains that support the red giant theory.
But there were some interlopers: strange forms of carbon made up of 60 carbon atoms, and a smaller concentration of a larger byproduct made up of 70 carbon atoms. These “uninvited guests,” as Croteau called them, had actually been found in an experiment conducted by Exxon’s Science Research Laboratory in New Jersey about a year ago, but no one paid much attention to them.
After days of work, on September 9, the team reached a conclusion about its structure. “C60 appears to be completely non-reactive, a behavior that is difficult to reconcile with a flat hexagonal graphene sheet, which is the most obvious first thought,” Croteau said.
In theory, the flat graphene sheet would have had lots of dangling bonds that would make it more reactive.
For several days, scientists worked with Toothpicks, jelly beans, and scraps of paper in hexagons and pentagonsand other “low-tech” modeling solutions to try to solve the structure of this 60-carbon molecule.
Croteau harkens back to the 1967 Expo in Montreal, where 20th-century futurist and inventor Buckminster Fuller was displaying a geodesic dome, a spherical structure with a grid of triangles on its surface, which he had designed. Patent In the 1950s. Smalley went to his office to get a book detailing Fuller’s work, and they discovered the proposed structure.
The resulting compound, which they called buckminsterfullerene, was a molecule with incredible symmetry. The paper describing the new molecule was published on November 14, 1985 in the journal natureThey were soon nicknamed buckyballs.
Over the next few years, the team deduced the properties of a class of closed molecules, called fullerenes. By 1990, scientists discovered that by placing an electric arc between two pieces of carbon, they could… Producing batches of buckyballs.
Croteau, Smalley and Curl won a race 1996 Nobel Prize in Chemistry For their discovery and characterization of buckyballs.
The fullerene class has proven useful, and buckyballs’ chemical relatives, called nanotubes, are extremely strong and have high thermal and electrical conductivity. These nanotubes have become crucial in… Atomic force microscopes, batteries, coatings and biosensors. But even though scientists have suggested using buckyballs for everything Quantum computing to Drug deliverythey have not yet found their niche in mainstream applications.