Richard
Errett Smalley, Nobel laureate and a leading voice for nanoscale science and technology, died
of leukemia on 28 October 2005 in Houston, Texas.
Born in Akron, Ohio, on 6
June 1943, Rick credited his early interest in science to his parents and extended family, and to
the launch of Sputnik in 1957. He spent two years at Hope College in Holland, Michigan, and
completed his BS in chemistry at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, in 1965. After a four-year
stint in industry with the Shell Chemical Co, Rick undertook graduate studies in chemistry at Princeton
University under Elliot Bernstein. He received his PhD in 1973 with a dissertation entitled "The
Lower Electronic States of 1,3,5 Symtriazine."
For his postdoctoral research
with Donald Levy at the University of Chicago, Rick switched from working with condensed matter
systems to high-resolution gas-phase spectroscopy. Spectra for polyatomic molecules, even
small ones, are highly complicated by molecular rotation. While preparing for his final oral exams
at Princeton, however, Rick had read a paper in which authors Yuan Lee and Stuart Rice pointed out
that the supersonic expansions used to produce molecular beams could cool molecular rotation,
and he immediately realized the significance of that comment to his spectroscopy research. In
1974, Rick, Levy, and colleague Lennard Wharton published the first rotationally cooled fluorescence
excitation spectrum of NO2, and they went on to develop supersonic molecular-beam
spectroscopy. Supersonic jet cooling has allowed the detailed analyses of the structure and dynamics
of polyatomic molecular systems.
In 1976 Rick accepted an
assistant professor position at Rice University in Houston. There he demonstrated an amazing
ability to imagine and then construct large, complex machines for his research. An example is his
cluster-beam apparatus called AP2, pictured here. With that machine he developed a method to send
pulsed lasers into a supersonic nozzle to generate vaporized materials that would cool and emerge
as clusters. The clusters could be studied spectroscopically, by mass spectrometry, or simultaneously
by both. Rick's method enabled the investigation of metal and semiconductor nanoparticle ions
with precisely known numbers of atoms. Clearly, his influence on nanoscale science began well
in its prehistory.
Rick rapidly became an intellectual
force at Rice and rose quickly in the academic ranks. He was appointed the Gene and Norman Hackerman
Chair of Chemistry in 1982, a professor of physics in 1990, and University Professor in 2002. A member
and supporter of the Rice Quantum Institute, he served as its director from 1986 to 1996. He was elected
a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 1990.
In 1985, Harold Kroto of
the University of Sussex and Robert Curl Jr, a colleague at Rice, convinced Rick to study carbon
in AP2. Through those experiments, Rick and his team, including graduate students James Heath
and Sean O'Brien, discovered the fullerenes, a new elemental form of carbon. After the initial
publications, he and his coworkers continued to gather evidence for the "fullerene hypothesis"
through a series of elegant cluster-beam experiments. In 1990 Donald Huffman and Wolfgang Krätschmer
generated macroscopic fullerene samples in a carbon-arc discharge; analysis of bulk samples
by diffraction and nuclear magnetic resonance removed any remaining doubt about the existence
of the new class of materials, and fullerene research quickly became a major field of study. Rick
shared the 1996 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Curl and Kroto for the discovery of the fullerenes.
Sumio Iijima's report of
multiwalled tubular carbon structures in 1991 fueled speculations that single-walled carbon
nanotubes (SWNTs), which are essentially extended fullerenes, might exist. Fascinating theoretical
predictions of the properties of SWNTs soon emerged and drew Rick's interest. Such tubes should
be the stiffest and strongest known material, act as metals or semiconductors depending on their
structure, and perhaps represent a route to the ultimate miniaturization of electronic devices.
In June 1993, Iijima at NEC and Don Bethune at IBM's Almaden Research Center simultaneously reported
the experimental observation of SWNTs. Yet the SWNTs suffered a production problem similar to
that of the fullerenes: Samples of sufficient yield and purity were not available to test the theoretical
predictions.
Seeing the vast potential
of SWNTs for basic and applied research, Rick focused his efforts entirely on them. By the mid-1990s,
his motto was, "If it ain't tubes, we don't do it." In 1996 his lab developed a laser-vaporization
method to produce SWNTs from graphite rods doped with cobalt and nickel. The purity of the laser-vaporized
material, and his willingness to make it widely available to the research community, enabled the
confirmation of many of the electronic-structure predictions. However, Rick knew that laser
vaporization was not amenable to the large-scale production of nanotubes needed for their applications.
Therefore, he also developed a gas-phase catalytic route based on iron and high-pressure carbon
monoxide, which led him back into industry and his love for big machines.
In addition to synthesis,
Rick worked on many aspects of nanotubes, including their mechanical, magnetic, and electronic
properties; their use as field emitters and probes; and their functionalization, purification,
and formation into fibers and membranes. A significant advance occurred in 2002 with the formation
of suspensions of well-isolated nanotubes in surfactants. With semiconducting nanotubes now
free of the quenching effects of metallic nanotubes, Rick observed bandgap fluorescence with
Bruce Weisman, his colleague at Rice.
With his work in nanoscale
science and technology, Rick continued to shape research directions at Rice and beyond. Rice established
the Center for Nanoscale Science and Technology in 1996 with Rick as its founding director. In his
honor, the center was recently renamed the Richard E. Smalley Institute for Nanoscale Science
and Technology.
Rick was a visionary in all
of his endeavors. The detailed minutiae of a group meeting would often give way to a hypnotic description
of where a project was headed and why it was important. Armed with such dedicated vision, he crossed
the globe to speak on the importance of energy production and of training a scientific workforce,
and how nanoscale science and technology could help accomplish those goals. His dramatic 1999
testimony before the US House of Representatives was a key factor in the establishment of the multi-agency
National Nanotechnology Initiative in 2000.
Rick was incredibly driven
in all his efforts and refused to give up on a problem until he solved it or proved it could not be solved.
Such diligence was a key factor in his success and was an inspiration to his students and collaborators.
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