Harold Kroto
Kroto, Harold (1939-) is a British chemist and spectroscopist who, with American chemists Richard Errett Smalley and Robert Floyd Curl, Jr., was the first to discover the “buckyball,” or “fullerene,” a class of large molecules having an even number of carbon atoms clustered together in a closed shape with a hollow interior. For their discovery, they received the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1996.
Harold Walter Krotoschiner was born on Oct. 7, 1939, and after the age of 1, grew up in Bolton, Lancashire. His father changed the family name to Kroto in 1955. He attended the Bolton School and spent school holidays working in his father's balloon factory.
Kroto was encouraged by a high school chemistry teacher to attend the University of Sheffield. He studied organic chemistry before focusing on quantum mechanics and then spectroscopy.
Kroto received a first-class honors B.Sc. degree in chemistry in 1961, and in 1964, his Ph.D. degree at Sheffield as well, with a thesis on the spectroscopy of free radicals produced by flash photolysis (the action of radiant energy in the process of chemical decomposition).
In 1964, Kroto accepted the offer of a postdoctoral research position at the National Research Council (NRC) in Ottawa, Canada, which was recognized as one of the most successful facilities of its kind and thus had attracted several brilliant scientists in the field of spectroscopy. Only 25 but inspired by his colleagues, Kroto made significant findings of his own using flash photolysis and spectroscopy and began working with microwave spectroscopy. He remained at NRC for two years. He spent a year in the United States working for Bell Labs, where he gained experience in laser Raman spectroscopy and did research in quantum chemistry.
In 1967, he accepted a post at Sussex University in Brighton, England, and served as a full professor there from 1985 to 1991, when he was granted a Royal Society research professorship.
Kroto's research at Sussex involved the carbon clusters that radio astronomers had found in space in the vicinity of red giant stars. In 1984, he traveled to Rice University in Houston to learn about an apparatus developed by Smalley to study carbon clusters. He returned in 1985, and he, Smalley, and Curl agreed to collaborate on Kroto's search for carbon chains. It was not long after that they discovered the first and most commonly appearing fullerene.
That molecule was an extremely stable “closed cage” carbon cluster containing 60 atoms and shaped much like a soccer ball, with 20 hexagonal faces, 12 pentagonal faces, and 60 vertices connecting the atoms one to another. Because its structure also echoed the geodesic domes of Buckminster Fuller, the team originally dubbed their discovery the buckminsterfullerene, later shortened to fullerene. Since the subsequent discovery of several other carbon clusters with similar properties, “fullerene” has come to refer to the entire class of these large molecules, and they are often referred to as “buckyballs.” Buckyballs exhibit behavior much like a perfect sphere and at room temperature rotate randomly and continuously.
Labeled C60, the original fullerene was an exciting discovery in part because it represented an entirely new carbon allotrope. Until that time, only six crystalline forms of the carbon element had been known, including two types of diamond, two types of graphite, chaoit, and carbon (VI).
Several years passed before the implications of the discovery of fullerenes were fully understood. It was not until 1996 that Kroto and his colleagues were awarded their Nobel Prize. That year, Kroto was knighted for this contribution.
The discovery of fullerenes has been important to condensed matter physics and has opened up new possibilities for research in carbon chemistry, semiconductors, and polymers, while buckyballs themselves are the subject of a tremendous amount of investigation by both chemists and physicists. Kroto speaks frequently on fullerenes and has established the Vega Science Trust to create high-quality science films for broadcast on educational television.