Douglas Dean Osheroff
Osheroff, Douglas Dean (1945-), an American physicist, shared the 1996 Nobel Prize in physics with David Morris Lee and Robert Coleman Richardson for their 1972 discovery that helium-3, a rare isotope of helium, becomes a superfluid when cooled to about two-thousandths of a Celsius degree above absolute zero.
Absolute zero (-273.15 °C, or -459.67 °F.) is the lowest temperature that scientists believe is possible. Supercooled helium-3, along with helium-4, are the only known superfluids. They flow without any internal friction, exhibit very high heat conductivity, and behave according to quantum mechanical laws rather than those of classical fluid mechanics. Superfluids may shed light on galaxy formation. Scientists have used them experimentally to reproduce certain helium reactions that are believed to have occurred in the first microseconds after the “big bang.”
The second of five children of a physician married to a nurse, Osheroff was interested in science from childhood, and as a high school senior he constructed a 100 keV X-ray machine. He graduated from the California Institute of Technology in 1967. As a graduate student at Cornell University, where he earned his doctorate (1973), Osheroff worked in Lee's low-temperature laboratory. While investigating the properties of helium-3 under very low temperatures, Osheroff advised the other members of the research team of small jumps in the internal pressure of the sample they were studying. They determined that the helium-3 had undergone a phase change to superfluidity, in which a fluid's atoms shed their randomness, moving about in a coordinated manner. Once the superfluid properties of helium-3 were discovered, scientists could study quantum mechanical effects in visible systems.
While doing research in solid-state and low-temperature physics at Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey (1972-1987), Osheroff was awarded a MacArthur Prize Fellowship. In 1987, he became a professor at Stanford University, where he and his students continue work on superfluid and solid helium-3 and have developed a program to study the low-temperature properties of amorphous solids.