Schrieffer, John Robert

Schrieffer, John Robert,

1931–, American physicist, b., Oak Park, Ill., Ph.D. Univ. of Illinois, 1957. Schrieffer was a professor at the Univ. of Chicago (1957–60), the Univ. of Illinois (1960–62), the Univ. of Pennsylvania (1962–79), the Univ. of California, Santa Barbara (1980–92), and Florida State Univ. (1992–2006). He received the 1972 Nobel Prize in Physics with Leon Cooper and John BardeenBardeen, John
, 1908–91, American physicist, b. Madison, Wis., grad. Univ. of Wisconsin (B.S. 1928, M.S. 1929), Ph.D. Princeton, 1936. He was a research physicist at the Bell Telephone Laboratories from 1945 to 1951.
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 for their jointly developed theory of superconductivitysuperconductivity,
abnormally high electrical conductivity of certain substances. The phenomenon was discovered in 1911 by Heike Kamerlingh Onnes, who found that the resistance of mercury dropped suddenly to zero at a temperature of about 4.
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, now known as the BCS Theory. Although superconductivity was first described by Dutch physicist Heike Kamerlingh OnnesKamerlingh Onnes, Heike
, 1853–1926, Dutch physicist. He was, from 1882, professor of physics at the Univ. of Leiden. He made important studies of the properties of helium and, in attempting to solidify it, produced a temperature within one degree of absolute zero.
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 in 1911, it was not fully understood until a complete theoretical explanation of the phenomenon was provided by the trio in 1957.

Schrieffer, John Robert

 

Born May 31, 1931, in Oak Park, 111. American physicist.

Schrieffer graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1953. From 1953 to 1957 he worked at the Illinois Institute of Technology under the guidance of J. Bardeen. From 1957 to 1959 he taught at the University of Chicago, and from 1959 he was at the University of Illinois. In 1962 he became a professor at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.

Schrieffer’s main works deal with solid-state and low-temperature physics. With Bardeen and L. Cooper, Schrieffer worked out the microscopic theory of superconductivity (published 1957; Nobel Prize, 1972).

WORKS

In Russian translation:
Novoe v izuchenii sverkhprovodimosti. Moscow, 1962. (With J. Bardeen.)

REFERENCE

Galitskii, V. M. “Laureaty Nobelevskoi premii 1972 g. po fizike.” Priroda, 1973, no. 1.