CPH Theory

Welcome to CPH

E-Journal

به نشریه الکترونیکی سی. پی. اچ.

خوش آمدید

Nobel 1972

English Farsi Home Contact us News English Articles Seminars

English Articles page has been updated

Electron-Phonon Interactions and Superconductivity

Microscopic Quantum Interference Effects in the Theory of Superconductivity

Macroscopic Quantum Phenomena from Pairing in Superconductors

"for their jointly developed theory of superconductivity, usually called the BCS-theory"

John Bardeen	Leon Neil Cooper	John Robert Schrieffer

1/3 of the prize	1/3 of the prize	1/3 of the prize
USA	USA	USA
University of Illinois Urbana, IL, USA	Brown University Providence, RI, USA	University of Pennsylvania Philadelphia, PA, USA
b. 1908 d. 1991	b. 1930	b. 1931

Biography: John Bardeen

John Bardeen was born in Madison, Wisconsin, May 23, 1908.

He attended the University High School in Madison for several years, and graduated from Madison Central High School in 1923. This was followed by a course in electrical engineering at the University of Wisconsin, where he took extra work in mathematics and physics. After being out for a term while working in the engineering department of the Western Electric Company at Chicago, he graduated with a B.S. in electrical engineering in 1928. He continued on at Wisconsin as a graduate research assistant in electrical engineering for two years, working on mathematical problems in applied geophysics and on radiation from antennas. It was during this period that he was first introduced to quantum theory by Professor J.H. Van Vleck.

Professor Leo J. Peters, under whom his research in geophysics was done, took a position at the Gulf Research Laboratories in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Dr. Bardeen followed him there and worked during the next three years (1930-33) on the development of methods for the interpretation of magnetic and gravitational surveys. This was a stimulating period in which geophysical methods were first being applied to prospecting for oil.

Because he felt his interests were in theoretical science, Dr. Bardeen resigned his position at Gulf in 1933 to take graduate work in mathematical physics at Princeton University. It was here, under the leadership of Professor E.P. Wigner, that he first became interested in solid state physics. Before completing his thesis (on the theory of the work function of metals) he was offered a position as Junior Fellow of the Society of Fellows at Harvard University. He spent the next three years there working with Professors Van Vleck and Bridgman on problems in cohesion and electrical conduction in metals and also did some work on the level density of nuclei. The Ph.D. degree at Princeton was awarded in 1936.

From 1938-41 Dr. Bardeen was an assistant professor of physics at the University of Minnesota and from 1941-45 a civilian physicist at the Naval Ordnance Laboratory in Washington, D.C. His war years were spent working on the influence fields of ships for application to underwater ordnance and minesweeping. After the war, he joined the solid-state research group at the Bell Telephone Laboratories, and remained there until 1951, when he was appointed Professor of Electrical Engineering and of Physics at the University of Illinois. Since 1959 he has also been a member of the Center for Advanced Study of the University.

Dr. Bardeen's main fields of research since 1945 have been electrical conduction in semiconductors and metals, surface properties of semiconductors, theory of superconductivity, and diffusion of atoms in solids. The Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded in 1956 to John Bardeen, Walter H. Brattain, and William Shockley for "investigations on semiconductors and the discovery of the transistor effect," carried on at the Bell Telephone Laboratories. In 1957, Bardeen and two colleagues, L.N. Cooper and J.R. Schrieffer, proposed the first successful explanation of superconductivity, which has been a puzzle since its discovery in 1908. Much of his research effort since that time has been devoted to further extensions and applications of the theory. Dr. Bardeen died in 1991.

Biography: Leon Neil Cooper

Leon Cooper was born in 1930 in New York where he attended Columbia University (A.B. 1951; A.M. 1953; Ph.D. 1954). He became a member of the Institute for Advanced Study (1954-55) after which he was a research associate of Illinois (1955-57) and later an assistant professor at the Ohio State University (1957-58). Professor Cooper joined Brown University in 1958 where he became Henry Ledyard Goddard University Professor (1966-74) and where he is presently the Thomas J. Watson, Sr. Professor of Science (1974-).

Professor Cooper is Director of Brown University's Center for Neural Science. This Center was founded in 1973 to study animal nervous systems and the human brain. Professor Cooper served as the first director with an interdisciplinary staff drawn from the Departments of Applied Mathematics, Biomedical Sciences, Linguistics and Physics. Today, Cooper, with members of the Brown Faculty, postdoctoral fellows and graduate students with interests in the neural and cognitive sciences, is working towards an understanding of memory and other brain functions, and thus formulating a scientific model of how the human mind works.

Professor Cooper has received many forms of recognition for his work in 1972, he received the Nobel Prize in Physics (with J. Bardeen and J.R. Schrieffer) for his studies on the theory of superconductivity completed while still in his 20s. In 1968, he was awarded the Comstock Prize (with J.R. Schrieffer) of the National Academy of Sciences. The Award of Excellence, Graduate Faculties Alumni of Columbia University and Descartes Medal, Academie de Paris, Université Rene Descartes were conferred on Professor Cooper in the mid 1970s. In 1985, Professor Cooper received the John Jay Award of Columbia College. He holds seven honorary doctorates.

Professor Cooper has been an NSF Postdoctoral Fellow, 1954-55, Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Research Fellow, 1959-66 and John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellow, 1965-66. He is a fellow of the American Physical Society and American Academy of Arts and Sciences; Sponsor, Federation of American Scientists; member of American Philosophical Society, National Academy of Sciences, Society of Neuroscience, American Association for the Advancement of Science, Phi Beta Kappa, and Sigma Xi. Professor Cooper is also on the Governing Board and Executive Committee of the International Neural Network Society and a member of the Defense Science Board.

Professor Cooper is Co-founder and Co-chairman of Nestor, Inc., an industry leader in applying neural-network systems to commercial and military applications. Nestor's adaptive pattern-recognition and risk-assessment systems simulated in small conventional computers learn by example to accurately classify complex patterns such as targets in sonar, radar or imaging systems, to emulate human decisions in such applications as mortgage origination and to assess risks.

Biography: John Robert Schrieffer

John Robert Schrieffer was born in Oak Park, Illinois on May 31, 1931, son of John H. Schrieffer and his wife Louis (née Anderson). In 1940, the family moved to Manhasset, New York and in 1947 to Eustis, Florida where they became active in the citrus industry.

Following his graduation from Eustis High School in 1949, Schrieffer was admitted to Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where for two years he majored in electrical engineering, then changed to physics in his junior year. He completed a bachelor's thesis on the multiple structure in heavy atoms under the direction of Professor John C. Slater. Following up on an interest in solid state physics developed while at MIT, he began graduate studies at the University of Illinois, where he immediately began research with Professor John Bardeen. After working out a problem dealing with electrical conduction on semiconductor surfaces, Schrieffer spent a year in the laboratory, applying the theory to several surface problems. In the third year of graduate studies, he joined Bardeen and Cooper in developing the theory of superconductivity, which constituted his doctoral dissertation.

He spent the academic year 1957-58 as a National Science Foundation fellow at the University of Birmingham and the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, where he continued research in superconductivity. Following a year as assistant professor at the University of Chicago, he returned to the University of Illinois in 1959 as a faculty member. In 1960 he returned to the Bohr Institute for a summer visit, during which he became engaged to Anne Grete Thomsen whom he married at Christmas of that year.

In 1962 Schrieffer joined the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, where in 1964 he was appointed Mary Amanda Wood Professor in Physics. In 1980 he was appointed Professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara and to the position of Chancellor Professor in 1984. He served as Director of the Institute for Theoretical Physics in Santa Barbara from 1984-89. In 1992 he was appointed University Professor at Florida State University and Chief Scientist of the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory.

He holds honorary degrees from the Technische Hochschule, Munich and the Universities of Geneva, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Cincinnati, Tel-Aviv, Alabama. In 1969 he was appointed by Cornell to a six-year term as a Andrew D. White Professor-at-Large.

He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Sciences of which he is a member of their council, the American Philosophical Society, the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters and the Academy of Sciences of the USSR.

His awards include the Guggenheim Fellowship, Oliver E. Buckley Solid State Physics Prize, Comstock Prize, National Academy of Science, the Nobel Prize in Physics shared with John Bardeen and Leon N. Cooper in 1972, John Ericsson Medal, American Society of Swedish Engineers, University of Illinois Alumni Achievement Award, and in 1984 the National Medal of Science. The main thrust of his recent work has been in the area of high-temperature superconductivity, strongly correlated electrons, and the dynamics of electrons in strong magnetic fields.

The Schrieffers have three children, Bolette, Paul, and Regina.