2002 Seaborg Symposium and Banquet

The Science and Technology of Nanotubes

	Richard E. Smalley Professor Winner of the 1996 Nobel Prize in Chemistry Professor Smalley received his B.S. degree in 1965 from the University of Michigan and Ph.D. from Princeton in 1973, with an intervening four-year period in industry as a research chemist with Shell. During an unusually productive postdoctoral period with Lennard Wharton and Donald Levy at the University of Chicago, he pioneered what has become one of the most powerful techniques in chemical physics -- supersonic beam laser spectroscopy. He was named to the Gene and Norman Hackerman Chair in Chemistry at Rice University in 1982. He was one of the founders of the Rice Quantum Institute in 1979, and served as the Chairman from 1986 to 1996. Since January 1990 he has also been a Professor in the Department of Physics, and was appointed Director of the new Center for Nanoscale Science and Technology at Rice in 1996. In 1990 he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences, and in 1991 to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is the recipient of many prestigious national and international awards, including the 1996 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

His research at Rice has led to pioneering advances in the development of new experimental techniques, and to their application to a broad range of vital questions in chemical physics. He is widely known for the discovery and characterization of C₆₀ (Buckminsterfullerene), a soccer ball-shaped molecule which, together with other fullerenes such as C₇₀ , now constitutes the third elemental form of carbon (after graphite and diamond). His group has also been the first to generate fullerenes with metals trapped inside. His current research is focused on the production of continuous carbon fibers, which are essentially giant single-fullerene molecules. Just a few nanometers in width, but many centimeters in length, these fullerene fibers are expected to be the strongest fibers ever made, 100 times stronger than steel at one-sixth the weight.