Olli Lounasmaa

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Olli Lounasmaa.

Olli Viktor Lounasmaa (born August 20, 1930 in Turku , † December 27, 2002 in Goa , India ) was a Finnish low-temperature physicist.

Lounasmaa graduated from the University of Helsinki in 1953 , then was an assistant at the University of Turku and then went to the Clarendon Laboratory of the University of Oxford , where he received his doctorate in low temperature physics in 1957 (Specific heats at low temperatures, 1958). 1960 to 1964 he was visiting scientist at the Argonne National Laboratory and in 1964 he became professor of physical engineering at the Helsinki University of Technology. In 1965 he founded the Laboratory for Low Temperature Physics there, of which he was director until his retirement in 1995 and which bears his name from 2012 (as part of the University of Aalto ). He drowned bathing while on vacation in Goa as a result of a heart attack.

Lounasmaa found clear evidence in his laboratory that the new phase in helium 3 discovered by David M. Lee , Douglas D. Osheroff, and Robert C. Richardson in 1972 was superfluid . Lounasmaa and his colleagues measured the damping of a vibrating string before and after the phase transition and found a decrease in damping by a factor of 1000 in the superfluid state. This was also recognized by the Nobel Committee when the 1996 Nobel Prize went to Lee, Osheroff, and Richardson for discovering the superfluidity of helium 3 (Lounaasma was also nominated at the time). He also investigated the behavior of superfluid helium 3 during rotation and in magnetic fields.

In the early 1980s, he moved to a new field of work and became one of the leading scientists in the development of magnetic encephalography (MEG), in which images of the brain's activity are created using its magnetic field recorded by SQUID magnetometers. In doing so, he made use of his laboratory's expertise in low-temperature physics and magnetometers. He was involved in founding various companies: SHE in the early 1970s, Biomagnetic Technologies, 4-D Neuroimaging and in 1989 Neuromag, now part of Elekta. In this area he worked interdisciplinary with doctors and neuroscientists.

In 1984 he received the Fritz London Memorial Award , in 1994 the Kapiza Gold Medal of the Russian Academy of Sciences and in 1993 the Humboldt Research Award . In 1986 he became a Fellow of the American Physical Society . He was a member of the Finnish Academy (1997), the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences . He received honorary doctorates from the University of Helsinki, the Helsinki University of Technology and the Tampere University of Technology. In 1987 he received the Körber Prize for European Science with Riitta Hari , Matti Krusius and Martti Salomaa.

A prize for low temperature physics from the University of Aalto is named after him.

Fonts

  • Experimental Principles and Methods Below 1 K , 1st edition, Academic Press 1974
  • The superfluid phases of 3 He, Contemporary Physics, Volume 15, 1974, p. 353
  • with AI Ahonen, MT Haikala, M. Krusius: Phase Diagram of Liquid He3 between 0.7 and 2.5 mK, Phys. Rev. Lett., Volume 33, 1974, p. 628, Abstract ,
  • with AI Ahonen, MT Haikala, M. Krusius: Transverse NMR Measurements on Superfluid He3, Phys. Rev. Lett., Vol. 33, 1974, p. 1595, abstract
  • with AI Ahonen, J. Kokko, MA Paalanen, RC Richardson, W. Schoepe, Y. Takano: Mobility of Negative Ions in Superfluid He3, Phys. Rev. Lett., Vol. 37, 1976, p. 511, abstract
  • with VP Mineev, MM Salomaa: Superfluid He 3 in rotation, Nature, Volume 324, 1986, p. 333
  • with Pertti Hakonen: Vortics in rotating superfluid 3 He, Physics Today, February 1987
  • with Pertti Hakonen, Juha Simola: Vortices in rotating superfluid 3 He, Physica B, Volume 160, 1989, pp. 1-55
  • with George R. Pickett: The 3He Superfluids , Scientific American June 1990
  • with Matti Hämäläinen, Riitta Hari, Risto Ilmoniemi, Jukka Knuutila Magnetoencephalography — theory, instrumentation, and applications to noninvasive studies of the working human brain , Reviews of Modern Physics, Volume 65, 1993, pp. 413-497

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Nobel Prize 1996, Nobel Committee
personal data
SURNAME Lounasmaa, Olli
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Lounasmaa, Olli Viktor (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Finnish physicist
DATE OF BIRTH 20th August 1930
PLACE OF BIRTH Turku
DATE OF DEATH December 27, 2002
Place of death Goa