Douglas Osheroff

Douglas Dean Osheroff ( born August 1, 1945 in Aberdeen, Washington) is an American physicist.

In 1973 he received his doctorate in physics at Cornell University in Ithaca ( New York). He is currently professor of physics at Stanford University in California. In the research on magnetic properties of solid helium -3, he accidentally discovered the superfluid phase ( unresisting currents ) at very low temperatures ( below 0.5 Kelvin). He received the Nobel Prize for it in 1996 along with David Morris Lee and Robert Coleman Richardson. These three scientists used in their experiment, a new cooling method, can be allowed to cool in the helium -3 below 0.3 Kelvin by application of pressure. This marked a breakthrough in low-temperature physics.

As before him Richard Feynman at the Challenger disaster, he was appointed as a Nobel Prize winner in the commission investigating the Columbia disaster. Similar to Feynman, he criticized the approach of NASA. He was able to prove in his kitchen problems of the sheath of the shuttle in experiments.

In 1981 he was MacArthur Fellow.