David Morris Lee
Lee, David Morris (1931-) is an American physicist who specializes in ultralow-temperature physics. In 1972, Lee was one of a team of physicists who discovered that helium-3, a rare type of helium, becomes a superfluid when it is extremely cold. For this discovery, Lee shared the 1996 Nobel Prize for physics with colleagues Robert Coleman Richardson and Douglas Dean Osheroff.
Lee was born on Jan. 20, 1931, in Rye, New York. His parents, children of Jewish immigrants, were born and raised in New York City. His father was an electrical engineer and his mother was an elementary school teacher.
He majored in physics at Harvard University, graduating in 1952, then served in the U.S. Army for 22 months. He then studied physics at the University of Connecticut.
Lee enrolled in the Ph.D. program in physics at Yale University in the summer of 1955. There he learned a great deal about experimental low temperature physics, leading to the decision that this would be his area of specialization. His thesis topic involved research on liquid helium-3.
In January 1959, Lee became a faculty member at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, where he set up a low-temperature laboratory. In November 1971, Lee, his colleague Richardson, and doctoral student Osheroff experimented with helium-3 cooled so close to absolute zero that it was partly solid and partly liquid.
In one experiment, Osheroff noticed small jumps in the graph of pressure. In 1972, the team established that the pressure jumps were due to changes in the helium-3—it changed to a superfluid. The team had discovered the first of three superfluid phases of liquid helium-3. Because the atoms in superfluid helium-3 lose all their randomness and move in a coordinated manner, the fluid can flow up and out of an open container. They explained its behavior using the BCS theory which explains superconductivity (the loss of electrical resistance by some materials when cooled to extremely low temperatures).
The team's other low-temperature studies included magnetism in solid helium-3 and the persistence of movement in superfluids.