The three chemists are awarded the prize for having "created new spaces for chemistry", announces the Nobel Committee.
This year's prize is about frameworks, says Olof Ramström, expert within the Nobel Committee, at the announcement.
The frameworks consist of metal ions with organic molecules, which are linked together into a kind of scaffolding – metal-organic frameworks.
These MOFs form porous materials that can capture or separate different substances and therefore have great potential.
Want to capture and separate air
The laureates' discoveries have led to the construction of tens of thousands of different MOFs. Some of them can contribute to solving some of humanity's greatest challenges.
They could, for example, extract water from desert air, capture carbon dioxide in the air or store hydrogen.
Laureate Susumu Kitagawa, who is participating in the press conference by phone, says that he looks forward to discovering new properties of the material and how it can be used in society.
My dream is to capture air and separate air from, for example, carbon dioxide or oxygen, and convert it into usable material, he says.
Three friends
It was the Briton Richard Robson, now active at Melbourne University in Australia, who in 1989 tested using the atoms' inherent properties in a new way. He made an early construction with copper ions and organic molecules. When the substances were mixed, they were drawn to each other and formed "like a diamond, filled with lots of cavities", according to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.
But his construction was unstable – and easily collapsed. The Japanese Susumu Kitagawa, at Kyoto University, and the Jordanian-American Omar Yaghi at Berkeley in the USA took Robson's discovery further with new discoveries between 1992 and 2003.
Kitagawa showed that gases can flow in and out of the constructions, and he predicted that they would be able to become flexible. Yaghi created a very stable MOF material and showed that it is possible to modify MOFs in a rational way so that they get new and desired properties, writes the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in a press release.
The Nobel Committee has managed to reach all three to tell them that they have been awarded the prize.
All three said they were very happy to share the prize with the other two, because all three are friends, says Olof Ramström.
