Mildred Dresselhaus, the Queen of Carbon, Dies at 86

[JSngry]

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/23/science/mildred-dresselhaus-dead-queen-of-carbon.html

One reason Dr. Dresselhaus said she chose to study carbon was its relative unpopularity. “I was happy to work on a project that most people thought was hard and not that interesting,” she said. “If one day I had to be at home with a sick child, it wouldn’t be the end of the world.”

For its part, carbon is as capricious as any celebrity. It is the graphite of a pencil, worn down by a simple doodle. Arrayed in a three-dimensional crystal, it is a diamond, the hardest substance known.

Dr. Dresselhaus used resonant magnetic fields and lasers to map out the electronic energy structure of carbon. She investigated the traits that emerge when carbon is interwoven with other materials: Stitch in some alkali metals, for example, and carbon can become a superconductor, in which an electric current meets virtually no resistance.

Dr. Dresselhaus was a pioneer in research on fullerenes, also called buckyballs: soccer-ball-shaped cages of carbon atoms that can be used as drug delivery devices, lubricants, filters and catalysts.

She conceived the idea of rolling a single-layer sheet of carbon atoms into a hollow tube, a notion eventually realized as the nanotube — a versatile structure with the strength of steel but just one ten-thousandth the width of a human hair.

She worked on carbon ribbons, semiconductors, nonplanar monolayers of molybdenum sulfide, and the scattering and vibrational effects of tiny particles introduced into ultrathin wires.

She published more than 1,700 scientific papers, co-wrote eight books and gathered a stack of accolades as fat as a nanotube is fine.

Dr. Dresselhaus was awarded the National Medal of Science, the Presidential Medal of Freedom (bestowed by President Barack Obama), the Kavli Prize in Nanoscience, the Enrico Fermi prize and dozens of honorary doctorates. She also served as president of the American Physical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science and worked in the Department of Energy in the Clinton administration.

“Every morning she’d leave the house at 5:30, the first car in the parking lot every day, and everyone she collaborated with she viewed as family,” said Ms. Cooper, Dr. Dresselhaus’s granddaughter, who is a graduate student at M.I.T. “Her life and her science were intertwined.”