Buckyballs garner Nobel Prize in chemistry

17 Jun 2002

The 1996 chemistry Nobel Prize goes to Richard Smalley and Robert Curl of Rice University and Harold Croto of the University of Sussex (UK) for their discovery in 1985 of fullerenes.

Shaped like soccer balls, fullerenes are closed molecules consisting of 60, 70, and certain other higher numbers of carbon atoms. Because they resemble the geodesic domes pioneered by the architect Buckminster Fuller, the molecules are also called buckyballs.

In a recently proposed application of these extraordinary structures, scientists at North Carolina State University have twisted, compressed and bent a nanotube -- a honeycomb-structured tube of carbon atoms that is a sibling of buckyballs -- and have found it to have extraordinary resilience and strength. Their work, first published by Physical Review Letters, showed that a nanotube could be stretched by almost 40 percent without breaking and would make a thread capable of sustaining an incredible tension of 200 GPa (gigapascals) -- equivalent to supporting a 20-ton load on a 1 millimeter thread.