Sumio Iijima

Born on 2 May 1939, Sumio Iijima is a Japanese physicist who discovered carbon nanotubes. After earning his PhD in solid-state physics at Tohoku University in 1968, Iijima went to work at the university’s Research Institute for Scientific Measurements before accepting a position in 1970 at Arizona State University. While there, he began studying carbon’s atomic structure. In 1982 Iijima returned to his home country, first studying ultrafine metal particles at the Research Development Corporation of Japan, then returning to the study of carbon’s atomic structure in 1987 at the NEC Corporation in Tsukuba. In 1991 he discovered carbon nanotubes , cylindrical carbon nanostructures with unusual properties, such as exceptional strength and thermal conductivity. Those characteristics make nanotubes valuable for a number of commercial applications, including light but strong industrial materials and tiny yet powerful computer chips. Besides working on research in industry, Iijima also returned to academia in 1999 as a professor at Meijo University. For his achievements, Iijima has received a number of awards, including the 1976 American Crystallographic Association’s Bertram Eugene Warren Diffraction Physics Award, the 2008 Kavli Prize in Nanoscience, and the 2015 European Inventor Award. (Photo credit: 齋藤千絵, CC BY-SA 3.0 )

Date in History: 2 May 1939