Hip, HiPco hooray for Rice’s pioneering nanotube process

It’s been 10 years since Rick Smalley and his team at Rice University introduced HiPco, a process for producing the high-quality single-walled carbon nanotubes used in roughly two-thirds of nanotube research worldwide.

	This animation of a rotating carbon nanotube illustrates the structure in 3-D.

That’s cause to celebrate, and Rice’s Richard E. Smalley Institute for Nanoscale Science and Technology intends to do just that Nov. 5 with a reception in the third-floor halls and institute offices at the Space Science Building. The event will be held from 5 to 6:30 p.m. and is open to the public. Refreshments will be served.

The open-house style event will feature guided tours of the third-floor labs where Nobel laureates Smalley and Robert Curl and their team discovered the buckyball, aka carbon fullerene or C60. Research continues there today and throughout Rice to address, through the application of nanotechnology, such pressing issues as energy, water, the environment, disease and education.

HiPco is an acronym for high pressure carbon monoxide. Rice produces enough high-quality nanotubes in its reactor to satisfy its own needs as well as those of collaborators in many of the world’s research universities, and Rice licenses the technology to industry for bulk manufacture.

For information about the reception, visit http://nano.rice.edu.