|
Douglas Dean Osheroff
(1945)
American physicist who, along with David Lee and Robert Richardson,
was the corecipient of the 1996 Nobel Prize for Physics for their discovery
of superfluidity in the isotope helium-3 .
Osheroff received a bachelor's degree (1967) from the California Institute
of Technology and a doctorate (1973) from Cornell University in Ithaca,
N.Y. He was a graduate student working with Lee and Richardson in the
low-temperature laboratory at Cornell when the team made its discovery
in 1972. The team was investigating the properties of helium-3 under
temperatures of just a few thousandths of a degree above absolute zero
(-273 C). Osheroff noticed minute jumps in the internal pressure of
the sample of helium-3 under investigation, and he drew the team's attention
to these small deviations. The researchers eventually concluded that
the helium-3 had undergone a phase transition to a superfluid state,
in which a liquid's atoms lose their randomness and move about in a
coordinated manner. Such a substance lacks all internal friction, flows
without resistance, and behaves according to quantum mechanical laws
rather than to those of classical fluid mechanics. The discovery of
superfluidity in helium-3 enabled scientists to study directly in macroscopic--or
visible--systems the quantum mechanical effects that had previously
been studied only indirectly in molecules, atoms, and subatomic particles.
Osheroff conducted research at Bell Telephone Laboratories from 1972
to 1982 and headed solid-state and low-temperature research there from
1982 to 1987. He became a professor at Stanford (Calif.) University
in 1987.
|