Buckyballs bounce into Nobel history.

Eleven years ago, a group of researchers discovered that 60 carbon atoms can roll themselves up into a pattern similar to the patchwork of a soccer ball.

The researchers dubbed the molecule buckminsterfullerene for its resemblance to the domes designed by architect R. Buckminster Fuller.

For their perceptive elucidation of the molecular structure of these buck- yballs, Robert F. Curl Jr. and Richard E. Smalley of Rice University in Houston and Harold W. Kroto of the University of Sussex in Brighton, England, were awarded the 1996 Nobel Prize in Chemistry last week.

The real boom in buckyball research came 5 years after the original discovery (SN: 11/23/85, p. 325), when scientists determined how to make the molecules in large quantities (SN: 10/13/90, p. 238). Buckyballs can superconduct, lubricate, and absorb light, promising many applications.

Investigations have since expanded to include the larger class of compounds called fullerenes-hollow, cagelike molecules that have pentagons and hexagons in their structures. Researchers have filled them with other atoms, chemically modified their surfaces, and elongated them into tubes and rods.

Behind the first experiments that produced buckyballs was Kroto's theory that long carbon chains formed in interstellar gas clouds. Kroto urged the Rice group to put carbon in one of its instruments, designed for making clusters of atoms. With students Jim Heath and Sean O'Brien, the researchers found they could produce stable carbon-60 and carbon-70 molecules. "The fullerene development was just completely unexpected," Curl says.

Despite earlier evidence of the existence of large carbon clusters, Curl, Kroto, and Smalley were the first to focus on the unusual stability of car- bon-60, says Mildred S. Dresselhaus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technol- ogy.

"The soccer-ball-shaped structure is so compellingly unique and so satisfying chemically, we decided it must be the correct explanation," Curl says. "In the years that followed, we got some probably well-deserved flak for jumping to a conclusion like that." Dresselhaus agrees, saying the researchers "had very flimsy evidence when they came up with that hypothesis." Still, she adds, most scientists at the time accepted the structure because "it explained a whole lot of things. It was consistent with everything that was known, and it was not inconsistent with anything." Eventually, other experiments confirmed that intuitive leap, giving fullerenes their place in scientific history.