Robert Curl’s ‘buckyball’ chemistry Nobel prize to be auctioned off

The 1996 Nobel prize in chemistry medal, awarded to Robert ‘Bob’ Curl for the joint discovery of fullerenes, is to be auctioned off at the end of March.

Curl, who died aged 88 on 3 July 2022, shared the 1996 prize with Harry Kroto and Richard Smalley. Together with graduate students James Heath, Yuan Liu and Sean O’Brien, they became the first to synthesise and identify the famous buckyball molecule after irradiating a graphite surface with laser pulses. This experiment created a carbon gas which then formed C₆₀ and C₇₀ molecules as it condensed.