John Robert Schrieffer

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John Robert Schrieffer (photo undated)

John Robert Schrieffer (born May 31, 1931 in Oak Park , Illinois - † July 27, 2019 in Tallahassee , Florida ) was an American physicist . In 1972, Schrieffer received the Nobel Prize in Physics together with Leon N. Cooper and John Bardeen "for their jointly developed theory of the superconductivity phenomenon , also known as BCS theory (Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer theory)".

life and work

Schrieffer grew up in Eustis , Florida, from 1947 , where his father worked in the citrus industry (having previously been a pharmaceutical agent). From 1949 he first studied electrical engineering (he was an avid radio hobbyist) and then physics at MIT , where he made his bachelor's degree in 1953 with John C. Slater . He then studied with John Bardeen at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign , where he initially dealt with electrical conduction on semiconductor surfaces, but was then involved in research between Bardeen and Cooper on the theory of superconductivity , which also became his doctoral thesis. According to his own statements, he had the decisive idea for the mathematical treatment of Cooper pairs of electrons in the BCS theory of superconductivity, which was later named after the three scientists, in the New York subway. After receiving his doctorate, he was a postdoc at the University of Birmingham with Rudolf Peierls and at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen in 1957/8 . In 1958 he was an assistant professor at the University of Chicago and from 1959 at the University of Illinois.

On another visit to Copenhagen in 1960, he met his wife (marriage in 1960). In 1962 he went to the University of Pennsylvania . In 1972 he received the Nobel Prize in Physics together with Cooper and Bardeen.

In 1980 he became a professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara and thus director of the University's Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics . He continued to work on superconductivity, starting in the 1980s as part of the newly discovered high-temperature superconductivity . In 1992 he became a professor at Florida State University and head of the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory there .

In November 2005, he was sentenced to two years in prison for a car accident he had caused that resulted in one death and seven injuries. According to his own account, he fell asleep behind the wheel, but his driver's license was withdrawn at the time of the accident.

He was an honorary doctor from the Technical University of Munich and the University of Geneva . In 1970 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences , in 1971 a member of the National Academy of Sciences and in 1975 of the American Philosophical Society . The Russian Academy of Sciences , he belonged since 1988 as a foreign member. He was also a member of the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences .

Awards

Fonts

  • Theory of Superconductivity. Benjamin 1964
  • Bonesteel, Gorkov (Ed.): Selected Papers of Robert Schrieffer. World Scientific 2002

literature

Web links

Commons : John Robert Schrieffer  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. Oral History Interview by Schrieffer, 1974 , AIP