In the early 1970s the chemistry of unsaturated carbon configurations was studied by a group at the University of Sussex led by Harry Kroto. In the 1980s Richard Smalley and Bob Curl at Rice University, Texas, used laser vaporisation of a suitable target to produce clusters of atoms. Kroto realised that by using a graphite target the cluster apparatus would be ideal to probe the formation of carbon chains. Thus developed a collaboration between Kroto’s group at Sussex and the one at Rice. The result was the discovery of a group of carbon compounds, fullerenes, including C60, which Kroto named buckminsterfullerene after the architect Buckminster Fuller. Fullerenes are closed cage structures in which each carbon is bound to three others and where the cage contains both hexagons and pentagons. Curl, Kroto and Smalley were awarded the 1996 Nobel Prize for Chemistry. This model is one of the original ones constructed by Harry Kroto. |
