Theodore H. Geballe

Theodore H. Geballe ( born January 20, 1920 in San Francisco) is an American experimental solid state physicist who deals with superconductivity.

Geballe studied chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley, where he earned a bachelor's degree in 1941, and received his doctorate in 1949 in physical chemistry at William Francis Giauque. During World War II he served three years his military service in the U.S. Army in the Pacific. 1952 to 1970 he was at Bell Laboratories, where he was head of the low-temperature physics. He became a professor at Stanford University, where he was Chairman from 1977 to 1988 director of the Center for Materials Research and was from 1975 to 1978 the Faculty of Applied Physics in 1968. From 1978, he was Theodore and Sydney Rosenberg Professor of Applied Physics. Since 1990 he is Professor Emeritus.

Geballe focused on low temperature physics, where he investigated semiconductors, superconductors and magnetic materials. In 1954, he discovered with Bernd Matthias and the other niobium -tin superconductors Nb3Sn, which (as in 1961 ) showed, even at high currents and high magnetic fields retains its superconductivity. It was the first such material was discovered and was used later, for example, in the coils of fusion reactors (ITER ). He has published over 400 works.

In 1970 he was awarded ( with Matthias ) the Oliver E. Buckley Condensed Matter Prize, for experiments that challenged the theoretical understanding and opened the field of high-field superconductors. In 1991 he was awarded the Von Hippel Award of the Materials Research Society in 1989 and the first Bernd T. Matthias Memorial Award. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences (1973 ), the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a Fellow of the American Physical Society. In 1975, he worked as a Guggenheim Fellow at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge.

At Stanford, the Theodore H. Geballe Laboratory for Advanced Materials (LAM ) is named after him.

Writings

• Geballe Superconductivity -from physics to technology, Physics Today, October 1993