Douglas D. Osheroff
active c. 1945, Aberdeen, Washington, USA
American physicist who shared the 1996 Nobel Prize in Physics for discovering superfluidity in helium-3 as a graduate student at Cornell.
Born in Aberdeen, Washington, Osheroff earned his bachelor's at Caltech (1967), where Richard Feynman's lectures helped confirm his career in physics. As a Cornell PhD student in David Lee and Robert Richardson's group, he first spotted the anomalies of April 1972 in the Pomeranchuk-cell pressurization curve that turned out to be the superfluid phase transitions of ³He. After his PhD (1972) he worked at Bell Laboratories, leading its low-temperature and solid-state departments, then moved to Stanford in 1987, where he also served on the Columbia Accident Investigation Board after the 2003 shuttle disaster.
Nobel-winning work
Osheroff was the graduate student who, on the night of 2 April 1972, noticed small 'glitches' while slowly pressurizing the Pomeranchuk cell — features in the melting-curve pressure at 2.491 and 2.001 mK that he initially dismissed, then convinced Lee and Richardson were real phase transitions in liquid ³He.
His subsequent NMR work showed the anomalies to be two superfluid phases, and he identified the A-phase as the equal-spin-pairing 'axial' state predicted by Anderson and Morel — founding the field of ³He superfluidity.
Workplaces: Stanford University, Bell Laboratories
United States