Robert Coleman Richardson
1937–2013, Washington, D.C., USA, Ithaca, New York, USA
American physicist who shared the 1996 Nobel Prize in Physics for the discovery of superfluidity in helium-3.
Born in Washington, D.C., Richardson studied physics at Virginia Tech and earned his PhD at Duke University in 1965 under Horst Meyer. He joined Cornell in 1967, co-directed the low-temperature program with David Lee, and supervised the graduate student Douglas Osheroff whose Pomeranchuk-cell measurements uncovered the superfluid phases of ³He in 1972. Richardson's mastery of millikelvin techniques — his book on the subject remains a standard — underpinned decades of helium physics at Cornell; he served as the university's vice provost for research (1998–2003).
Nobel-winning work
Richardson designed the experimental low-temperature program and mentored Osheroff's measurements; his expertise with Pomeranchuk refrigeration and NMR thermometry was crucial to reaching and identifying the ³He phase transitions at ~2.5 and ~2.0 mK.
After the 1972 discovery, his group characterized the A and B phases' magnetic and hydrodynamic properties — orbital textures, spin dynamics, and the NMR signatures that distinguished the anisotropic A phase from the isotropic B phase.
Workplaces: Cornell University
United States