Harold Kroto

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Sir Harold Walter Kroto KBE (born October 7, 1939 in Wisbech , Cambridgeshire , † April 30, 2016 ) was a British chemist with German roots.

Harold Kroto (2011)

For his work on fullerenes , a new modification of carbon in the form of spherical molecules, he received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1996 together with Robert F. Curl and Richard E. Smalley . He was close friends with Sir Józef Rotblat , who died in August 2005, and was the only scientist on the Manhattan Project who left the project before the atomic bomb was built.

Life

Kroto was born Harold Krotoschiner . The surname is of Silesian origin. The father's family came from Bojanowo , Poland , the mother's from Berlin . Both parents were born in Berlin and fled the Nazis to England in 1937 because his father was Jewish. In 1955 the family name was shortened to Kroto.

He grew up in Bolton , then Lancashire . There he attended the Bolton School, among others together with the actor Ian McKellen . As a schoolboy he began to be interested in chemistry , physics and mathematics . On the recommendation of his chemistry teacher Harry Heaney, who later became a professor of organic chemistry, he began studying chemistry in Sheffield .

In 1963 he married Margaret Henrietta Hunter. The couple have two sons, Stephen and David.

Study and work

In 1961 Kroto got a Bachelor of Science and in 1964 a Ph.D. in chemistry from the University of Sheffield . His doctoral research included high-resolution electron spectra of free radicals after flash photolysis .

He also dealt with the production of the first phosphaalkenes (compounds with carbon-phosphorus double bonds). Through his (unpublished) research on carbon suboxide , he became interested in molecules with carbon chains and multiple bonds. Originally concerned with organic chemistry , he increasingly tended towards quantum chemistry .

After completing his doctorate, he worked at the National Research Council in Canada and at Bell Laboratories in the USA. From 1967 he taught and researched at the University of Sussex in England. He became a professor in 1985 and was Royal Society Research Professor from 1991 to 2001 .

In the 1970s he began a research program in Sussex to search for carbon chains in interstellar space ; in previous studies, cyanoacetylene , H – C≡C – CN, had been discovered there. Between 1975 and 1978 , his group was able to detect cyanobutadiyne , H – C≡C – C≡C – C≡N, and cyanohexatriine , H – C≡C – C≡C – C≡C – C≡N, spectrally.

Together with Richard E. Smalley and Robert F. Curl from Rice University (Texas), he tried to simulate the chemistry of a carbon star. This not only resulted in the chain structures mentioned above, the experiments also led to the discovery of the C 60 molecule in 1985 (Buckminster fullerene , see fullerenes ). For this, the three scientists were awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1996.

Kroto has worked at Florida State University in Tallahassee since 2004, doing research in the field of nanotechnology .

Since 1995 he has worked on more than 100 scientific films for the Vega Science Trust, which he co-founded , more than 50 of which were broadcast by the BBC . The films can be downloaded free of charge from the UK website vega.org.uk.

Awards and honors

literature

Web links

Commons : Harold Kroto  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ RIP Harry Kroto (1939-2016). In: In the Dark. May 1, 2016, accessed May 2, 2016 .
  2. Hamish Johnston: Buckyball pioneer Harold Kroto dies at 76. In: physicsworld.com. May 3, 2016, accessed May 4, 2016 .
  3. a b Ingmar Grenthe: Chemistry, 1996-2000. World Scientific, 2003, ISBN 978-9-810-24959-5 , pp. 35-43 ( limited preview in Google book search).
  4. ^ Professor Sir Harry Kroto dies - University of Bolton. In: bolton.ac.uk. May 3, 2016, accessed May 4, 2016 .
  5. Professor Sir Harry Kroto. In: thetimes.co.uk. May 4, 2016, accessed May 4, 2016 .
  6. ^ Biographical data, publications and academic family tree of Harold W. Kroto at academictree.org, accessed on February 24, 2018.