Field
Chemical bonding, synthesis, and the discovery of new materials that reshape technology.
Geim and Novoselov isolated graphene — a single atomic layer of carbon — and showed it is a stable, highly conductive two-dimensional crystal. Famously, they peeled it from graphite using adhesive tape.
Bednorz and Müller discovered superconductivity in a copper-oxide ceramic at a far higher temperature than any known material, breaking the long-standing temperature ceiling and launching the field of high-temperature superconductivity.
The discovery of C60, a soccer-ball-shaped molecule of sixty carbon atoms. While vaporising graphite, the team found an unusually stable carbon cluster and proposed it was a hollow truncated-icosahedron cage, naming it after the architect Buckminster Fuller.
Pauling applied the new quantum mechanics to chemistry, explaining how atoms share electrons to form bonds. He introduced concepts — orbital hybridisation, resonance, and bond character — that became the language of structural chemistry.