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On May 27, 2008, Jacobs University invites the campus community and the interested public to the lecture »Architecture in NanoSpace« by Sir Harold Kroto. The 1996 Chemistry Nobel Prize laureate and co-discoverer of the new carbon allotropes “Fullerenes” will give an exciting insight into the latest developments in nanotechnology and its “useful” molecular constructions. The English-language talk, which is part of the series »Science leaders meet Jacobs University«, starts at 7 p. m. in the Campus Center and is free of charge.
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May
21, 2008]
About the Talk:
As the boundaries between Physics, Chemistry and Biology progressively dissolve, transdisciplinary research is leading to the fascinating “new” overarching field of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology. Ingenious strategies for the creation of complex molecules, exactly specified in structure as well as function, basically molecules that “do things”, are being developed. These structures, the size of which lies in the range of a billionth meter, are expected to enable the construction of miniaturized electronic components, the development of materials with novel properties as well as the implementation of highly cost and resource efficient production processes.
The discovery of the C60 molecule, for which Harold Kroto and his two scientific colleagues from Rice University, Robert Curl and Richard Smalley, received the Nobel Prize, and later on the creation of its elongated “Fullerene cousins”, the carbon nanotubes, made clear that the investigation of controlled bottom-up assembly of molecular structures is one of the crucial new experimental approaches of nanotechnology. In his talk, Harold Kroto will give fascinating fundamental insights into formation mechanisms of nanoscale devices as well as their application potential, which might include pocket-sized supercomputers, hurricane and earthquake resistant buildings as well as extraterrestrial structures in space research.
Sir Harold Kroto:
Harold Kroto, born in 1939, studied Chemistry at the University of Sheffield, where he received his PhD in Molecular Spectroscopy in 1964. After a position with the National Research Council in Ottawa and a year at the Murray Hill Bell Laboratories in New Jersey he returned to the UK in 1967 and started his academic career at the University of Sussex, Brighton, where he remained until 2004 and where he taught as a professor for 20 years. He now is holding the Francis Eppes Professorship for Chemistry at Florida State University.
In the 70s Harold Korto focused his research on electronic spectroscopy of gas phase free radicals, liquid phase Raman studies, and finally on microwave spectroscopy of long linear carbon chain molecules. Laboratory and radioastronomy studies led to the surprising discovery that these molecule types exist in interstellar space as well as stars. Laboratory experiments with co-workers from Rice University, which simulated the chemical reactions in the atmosphere of red giant stars, uncovered the existence of the fullerene C60 in 1985. C60 is an elegant, highly symmetric molecule shaped like a soccer ball. In addition to diamonds and graphite it represents a third form of elemental carbon. The discovery of C60, for which Kroto and his collaborators received the Chemistry Nobel Prize in 1996, caused him to probe the consequences of this molecule’s concept for exploitation in synthetic chemistry and material sciences application.
Harold Kroto was elected a Fellow of The Royal Society in 1990. He chaired the editorial board of the Chemical Society Reviews from 1990 – 1998. In 1995, he initiated the Vega Science Trust to create educational science films of high quality for network television broadcast. For his contributions to chemistry he was knighted in 1996. Harold Kroto has received honorary degrees from a number of universities in the UK and abroad, as well as many scientific awards including the International Prize for New Materials by the American Physical Society (1992), the Italgas Prize for Innovation in Chemistry (1992), the Royal Society of Chemistry Longstaff Medal (1993), the Faraday Award (2001) and the Copley Medal of the Royal Society (2002). He was President of the Royal Society of Chemistry from 2002 to 2004 and was elected into the National Academy of Sciences in 2007. In the same year he started a new educational initiative at Florida State University known as Global Eduaction Outreach in Science, Engineering and Technology.
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