Sumio Iijima
Japanese physicist, chemist, and nanotechnologist (born 1939)
Sumio Iijima (飯島 澄男, Iijima Sumio; born 2 May 1939) is a Japanese physicist and inventor, often cited for his discovery of carbon nanotubes. Although carbon nanotubes had been observed prior to his "invention", Iijima's 1991 paper generated unprecedented interest in the carbon nanostructures and has since fueled intense research in the area of nanotechnology.
Born in Saitama Prefecture in 1939, Iijima graduated with a Bachelor of Engineering degree in 1963 from the University of Electro-Communications, Tokyo. He received a Master's degree in 1965 and completed his Ph.D. in solid-state physics in 1968, both at Tohoku University in Sendai.
Between 1970 and 1982 he performed research with crystalline materials and high-resolution electron microscopy at Arizona State University. He visited the University of Cambridge during 1979 to perform studies on carbon materials.
He worked for the Research Development Corporation of Japan from 1982 to 1987, studying ultra-fine particles, after which he joined NEC Corporation where he is still employed. He discovered carbon nanotubes in 1991. When he discovered carbon nanotubes, he not only took pictures of them but he put two together and explained what they really are. Afterwards, he was credited with the discovery.
The public source identifies “Sumio Iijima” as japanese physicist, chemist, and nanotechnologist (born 1939). This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Sumio, Iijima and Japanese.
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This entry incorporates text from “Sumio Iijima” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.