David Morris Lee
active c. 1931, Rye, New York, USA
American physicist who shared the 1996 Nobel Prize in Physics for the discovery of superfluidity in helium-3.
Born in Rye, New York, Lee studied at Harvard, served in the US Army, and earned his PhD at Yale in 1959 under Henry Fairbank in low-temperature physics. At Cornell from 1959 he co-founded the Laboratory of Atomic and Solid State Physics and led the low-temperature group whose Pomeranchuk-cell experiments with Robert Richardson and graduate student Douglas Osheroff revealed in 1972 the superfluid phases of ³He — a Fermi-liquid analogue of BCS pairing with p-wave Cooper pairs. He moved to Texas A&M in 2009.
Nobel-winning work
Using Pomeranchuk cooling — compressing a liquid–solid ³He mixture along its melting curve — the Cornell team cooled ³He below 3 mK. In 1972 they observed kinks in the pressurization curve at ~2.7 and ~2.0 mK; NMR measurements soon proved these were transitions into two distinct superfluid phases, the A and B phases of ³He.
The discovery (Nature and Physical Review Letters, 1972) showed that a Fermi system can condense via anisotropic p-wave pairing — magnetic-triplet Cooper pairs — providing the first accessible p-wave superfluid and a testing ground for concepts later applied to unconventional superconductors and cosmology (cosmic strings via the Kibble–Zurek mechanism).
Workplaces: Cornell University, Texas A&M University
United States