Creators of metal–organic frameworks honored with chemistry Nobel
DOI: 10.1063/pt.jups.hccf
Susumu Kitagawa, Richard Robson, and Omar Yaghi (from left to right). (Photos, from left, by Kyoto University; Paul Burston/University of Melbourne; Brittany Hosea-Small for UC Berkeley.)
“For the development of metal–organic frameworks,” the 2025 Nobel Prize in Chemistry is to be awarded to Susumu Kitagawa (Kyoto University, Japan), Richard Robson (University of Melbourne, Australia), and Omar Yaghi (University of California, Berkeley). The laureates created and refined a new class of materials that have large empty spaces in their structure. The appeal of the materials, Physics Today‘s Johanna Miller reported in 2017 , “stems from their customizability: By choosing the right metal and organic units, one can independently tune the pores’ size, shape, topology, and surface chemistry.” In recent years, researchers have developed materials to extract water vapor and carbon dioxide from air, catalyze various chemical reactions, and serve other useful applications.
Selected articles in Physics Today
- Solid sorbent captures carbon (February 2022).
- A metal–organic framework separates ethylene from ethane (November 2018).
- Metal–organic framework extracts water from thin air (June 2017).
Read all of PT‘s Nobel coverage .
More about the authors
Alex Lopatka, alopatka@aip.org
