Douglas Dean Osheroff

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Douglas D. Osheroff

Douglas Dean Osheroff (born August 1, 1945 in Aberdeen , Washington ) is an American physicist.

In 1973 he received his PhD in physics from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York . He is currently a professor of physics at Stanford University in California. While researching the magnetic properties of solid helium-3 , he accidentally discovered the superfluid phase (resistance-free flow) at very low temperatures (below 0.5 Kelvin). He received the Nobel Prize for this in 1996 together with David Morris Lee and Robert Coleman Richardson . In their experiment, these three scientists used a new type of cooling method in which helium-3 can be cooled further below 0.3 Kelvin by applying pressure. This marked a breakthrough in low temperature physics .

Like Richard Feynman before him in the Challenger disaster , he was appointed Nobel Prize laureate to the commission of inquiry into the Columbia accident. Similar to Feynman, he criticized NASA's approach. In tests in his kitchen he was able to prove that there were problems with the sheathing of the shuttle.

In 1981 he was a MacArthur Fellow and a Fellow of the American Physical Society ; since 1982 he has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences , since 1987 of the National Academy of Sciences .

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