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Apr 5, 2024 · John Robert Schrieffer was an American physicist and winner, with John Bardeen and Leon N. Cooper, of the 1972 Nobel Prize for Physics for developing the BCS theory (for their initials), the first successful microscopic theory of superconductivity.
- The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
John Bardeen. John Robert Schrieffer ( / ˈʃriːfər /; May 31, 1931 – July 27, 2019) [1] was an American physicist who, with John Bardeen and Leon Cooper, was a recipient of the 1972 Nobel Prize in Physics for developing the BCS theory, the first successful quantum theory of superconductivity .
- Wu-Pei Su
- John Bardeen
- Condensed-matter physics
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Schrieffer was responsible for a critical component of the theory: defining the BCS wavefunction. For his work, Schrieffer—the “S” in BCS theory—shared the 1972 Nobel Prize in Physics with John Bardeen and Leon Cooper, and was later awarded the National Medal of Science.
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The story of how Robert Schrieffer solved a problem that had resisted the best minds in physics for more than 40 years, while riding the New York subway, is the stuff of legend in some circles. His explanation of how superconductivity works earned him a share of the 1972 Nobel Prize in Physics. A former president of the American Physical Society (APS), Schrieffer died on 27 July, aged 88.
In 1911 it was discovered that certain metals, when cooled to low enough temperatures, can carry current with no resistance. This seemingly miraculous property, superconductivity, arises directly from quantum mechanics, and underlies many contemporary technologies, such as magnetic resonance imaging body scanners and particle accelerators. For decades, however, there was no theory to explain how electrons in superconducting materials overcome their own mutually repulsive properties and other causes of resistance.
In early 1957, Schrieffer, then a 25-year-old graduate student, wrote down a quantum-mechanical wave function that accounted for the behaviour of electrons in superconductors. With his thesis adviser John Bardeen and postdoc colleague Leon Cooper, he published the now-famous BCS wave function and the full theory of superconductivity less than a year later — named BCS after the trio, who shared the Nobel prize (J. Bardeen, L. N. Cooper and J. R. Schrieffer Phys. Rev. 108, 1175; 1957).The work has had far-reaching consequences for both fundamental science and practical technology. Schrieffer continued to make foundational contributions to our understanding of electrons in solids.
Born in Oak Park, Illinois, in 1931, Schrieffer studied physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge as an undergraduate. It was at graduate school at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign that he began working with Bardeen, who in 1956 had just won a share of the physics Nobel for the invention of the transistor.
Bardeen suggested Schrieffer try his hand at understanding superconductivity. This was a risky proposition. After the initial success of quantum theory in describing ordinary conductors, insulators and semiconductors, there had been countless attempts to explain superconductors and all had failed. But the timing was right. Bardeen, with his then-postdoc David Pines, had studied the effect of phonons (quantized sound waves) on metals, showing that they mediated an attractive interaction between electrons. Cooper found that this attractive interaction could lead to the formation of bound pairs of electrons. However, Cooper’s theory described only the formation of a single electron pair. The question remained how to describe the many electrons pairing in the full electronic state of the metal, and why such pairing would lead to the properties of a superconductor.
- Nick Bonesteel, Gregory Boebinger
- 2019
In the early 1990s, Schrieffer moved to Tallahassee, Florida, where he was a university eminent scholar professor at Florida State University and a chief scientist at the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory before his retirement in 2006. In addition to the Nobel Prize, Schrieffer received many other honors.
Sep 20, 2019 · John Robert (“Bob”) Schrieffer, one of the leading theoretical physicists of the past century, passed away on 27 July. He was 88. His seminal work with physicists John Bardeen and Leon Cooper earned them the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1972 and is now the accepted the theory of superconductivity.
After completing his dissertation, Schrieffer won a National Science Foundation Fellowship for the academic year 1957-58, which he spent at the University of Birmingham and the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen. He continued to make research on the theory of superconductivity and gave some seminars on that topic.
