Smalley pioneered the use of laser vaporization to generate atomic clusters. In 1985, he and his colleagues at Rice discovered a cluster composed of 60 atoms of carbon (H.W. Kroto, et al., Nature, 318:162-3, 1985). Unlike other atomic clusters, which apparently can grow indefinitely, this cluster was surprisingly stable. It was another week before Smalley hit upon the three-dimensional configuration that could explain the size and stability of the molecule. One evening at home, playing with paper cutouts of hexagons and pentagons, Smalley came up with a polyhedron with 60 vertices, corresponding to the 60 atoms of carbon. When he showed his paper model to a mathematician at Rice the next day, he recalls, "I was informed in a rather blunt way that `what you've got here is a soccer ball.'" The cluster was dubbed buckminsterfullerene, or buckyball, after Buckminster Fuller, the inventor of the geodesic dome. Fuller's dome is ...
Discoverer Of Buckminsterfullerene Wins American Physical Society's Langmuir Prize
Richard Smalley, professor of chemistry and physics at Rice University, Houston, and discoverer of "buckyball," has been selected by the American Physical Society to receive the 1991 Irving Langmuir Prize. The $10,000 award, which will be presented next month at the society's annual meeting, is given each year to a person who has made an outstanding contribution to chemical physics or physical chemistry within the past 10 years. APS gives the award in odd-numbered years, and the American Chemic
Written byRebecca Andrews
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