Carbons Create a Curious Kind of Conducting Cord

摘要

Richard ("Rick") Smalley shared the Nobel Prize for chemistry in 1996, along with Harry Kroto and Robert Curl, for the discovery of a variety of carbon, the fullerenes, whose molecules consist of spheres of 60 atoms or more. Not only did the new compounds have fascinating chemical properties, but they were the forerunner of even more unusual forms of carbon, the so-called nanotubes.