The Nobel Prize 2010 in Chemistry announced- "Palladium catalysed cross-coupling in organic synthesis

The 2010 Nobel Prize in chemistry was awarded Wednesday to three professors for a tool to make carbon-carbon bonds in organic chemistry, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced.

The professors are Richard Heck of the University of Delaware, Ei-Ichi Negishi of Purdue University and Akira Suzuki of Hokkaido University.

The tool the professors devised is called palladium-catalyzed cross-coupling, according to the committee.

Negishi told reporters by phone from the United States that he was asleep when he heard the news an hour earlier. He said winning the prize was a dream of his, but he didn't know whether he would win.

The tool has applications in a wide range of fields, from agriculture and pharmaceuticals to coatings for electronic components, like chips, the Nobel committee said.

"The key word here is versatility," Negishi said. "One of our dreams is to be able to synthesize any organic compounds of importance, whether it is medicinally important compounds ... or important from the point of view of material science. And we believe that our technology or our chemistry will be applicable to a very wide range of compounds, without knowing what they might be." (CNN)

സ്റ്റോക്‌ഹോം: രസതന്ത്രത്തിനുള്ള 2010 ലെ നൊബേല്‍ സമ്മാനത്തിന് മൂന്നു പേര്‍ക്ക്. റിച്ചാര്‍ഡ് ഹെക്ക്, ഐച്ചി നെജിഷി, അകിര സുസുക്കി എന്നിവരാണ് നൊബേലിന് അര്‍ഹരായത്. ഓര്‍ഗാനിക് രസതന്ത്രം വിഭാഗത്തില്‍ പ്രകൃതിദത്തമായുള്ള കാര്‍ബണ്‍ മൂലകങ്ങളുടെ അതേ മാതൃക പല്ലാഡിയം മൂലകത്തിന്റെ സഹായത്തോടെ പരീക്ഷണശാലയിലും ഉണ്ടാക്കാമെന്നതാണ് ഇവരുടെ കണ്ടുപിടിത്തത്തിന്റെ കാതല്‍.

പ്രകൃതിയിലുള്ള മിക്കവാറും എല്ലാ വസ്തുക്കളുടെയും അടിസ്ഥാനഘടകമായ കാര്‍ബണ്‍ ആധാരശിലയെ പിന്തുടരാനുള്ള ശ്രമമായിരുന്നു ഇവരുടെത്. ഔഷധരംഗത്തും ഇലക്ട്രോണിക് സാങ്കേതികതയിലും പുതുവിപ്‌ളവം സൃഷ്ടിക്കാന്‍ ഈ കണ്ടുപിടിത്തത്തിനു സാധിക്കുമെന്നാണു കരുതുന്നത്.

മറ്റു മൂലകങ്ങളുമായി സംയോജിക്കാനുള്ള കാര്‍ബണിന്റെ ന്യൂനത പല്ലാഡിയം ആറ്റത്തിന്റെ സംയോജനത്തോടെ മറികടക്കാന്‍ സാധിച്ചു. ഇതുമൂലം കെമിസ്റ്റുകള്‍ക്ക് കാര്‍ബണ്‍ കലര്‍ത്തിയുള്ള മിശ്രിതങ്ങള്‍ക്ക് പല്ലാഡിയത്തിന്റെ സഹായത്തോടെ വളരെ വേഗത്തില്‍ ഔഷധക്കൂട്ട് തയ്യാറാക്കാന്‍ സാധിക്കും. ഗവേഷണമേഖലയില്‍നിന്ന് കൊമേഴ്‌സ്യല്‍ ഉല്‍പ്പാദനത്തിലേക്ക് മാറുന്നതോടെ ഈ കണ്ടുപിടിത്തം ചരിത്രം സൃഷ്ടിക്കുമെന്നതാണ് ശാസ്ത്രരംഗത്തെ ആവേശഭരിതരാക്കുന്നത്. ന്യൂവാര്‍ക്കിലെ ഡെലാവേര്‍ യൂണിവേഴ്‌സിറ്റിയില്‍ പ്രഫസറായ റിച്ചാര്‍ഡ് എഫ്. ഹക്ക് അമേരിരക്കക്കാരനാണ്. ഐഷി നെഡിഷിയും അകിറ സുസൂക്കിയും ജപ്പാന്‍കാര്‍. മൂവര്‍ക്കും എണ്‍പതിനേടടുത്താണ് പ്രായം. (Mathrubhumi)

Proton size is smaller than what we have now with- tells Nature magazine

The proton seems to be 0.00000000000003 millimetres smaller than researchers previously thought, according to work published in today's issue of Nature¹.

The difference is so infinitesimal that it might defy belief that anyone, even physicists, would care. But the new measurements could mean that there is a gap in existing theories of quantum mechanics. "It's a very serious discrepancy," says Ingo Sick, a physicist at the University of Basel in Switzerland, who has tried to reconcile the finding with four decades of previous measurements. "There is really something seriously wrong someplace."
Protons are among the most common particles out there. Together with their neutral counterparts, neutrons, they form the nuclei of every atom in the Universe. But despite its everday appearance, the proton remains something of a mystery to nuclear physicists, says Randolf Pohl, a researcher at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics in Garching, Germany, and an author on the Nature paper. "We don't understand a lot of its internal structure," he says.
From afar, the proton looks like a small point of positive charge, but on much closer inspection, the particle is more complex. Each proton is made of smaller fundamental particles called quarks, and that means its charge is roughly spread throughout a spherical area.
Physicists can measure the size of the proton by watching as an electron interacts with a proton. A single electron orbiting a proton can occupy only certain, discrete energy levels, which are described by the laws of quantum mechanics. Some of these energy levels depend in part on the size of the proton, and since the 1960s physicists have made hundreds of measurements of the proton's size with staggering accuracy. The most recent estimates, made by Sick using previous data, put the radius of the proton at around 0.8768 femtometres (1 femtometre = 10^-15 metres).

Small wonder

Pohl and his team have a come up with a smaller number by using a cousin of the electron, known as the muon. Muons are about 200 times heavier than electrons, making them more sensitive to the proton's size. To measure the proton radius using the muon, Pohl and his colleagues fired muons from a particle accelerator at a cloud of hydrogen. Hydrogen nuclei each consist of a single proton, orbited by an electron. Sometimes a muon replaces an electron and orbits around a proton. Using lasers, the team measured relevant muonic energy levels with extremely high accuracy and found that the proton was around 4% smaller than previously thought.

That might not sound like much, but the difference is so far from previous measurements that the researchers actually missed it the first two times they ran the experiment in 2003 and 2007. "We thought that our laser system was not good enough," Pohl says. In 2009, they looked beyond the narrow range in which they expected to see the proton radius and saw an unmistakable signal.
"What gives? I don't know," says Sick. He says he believes the new result, but that there is no obvious way to make it compatible with years of earlier measurements.
"Something is missing, this is very clear," agrees Carl Carlson, a theoretical physicist at the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia. The most intriguing possibility is that previously undetected particles are changing the interaction of the muon and the proton. Such particles could be the 'superpartners' of existing particles, as predicted by a theory known as supersymmetry, which seeks to unite all of the fundamental forces of physics, except gravity.
But, Carlson says, "the first thing is to go through the existing calculations with a fine-toothed comb". It could be that an error was made, or that approximations made in existing quantum calculation simply aren't good enough. "Right now, I'd put my money on some other correction," he says. "It's also where my research time will be going over the next month." 

• References

  1. Pohl, R. et al. Nature 466, 213-217 (2010).