John Robert Schrieffer
John Robert Schrieffer ( born May 31, 1931 in Oak Park, Illinois ) is an American physicist. Schrieffer received in 1972 along with Leon N. Cooper and John Bardeen received the Nobel Prize in Physics "for their jointly developed theory of superconductivity phenomenon, also BCS theory ( Bardeen -Cooper - Schrieffer theory ) called ".
Life and work
Schrieffer grew up from 1947 in Eustis, Florida, where his father worked in the citrus industry ( pharmaceutical representatives after he was before). From 1949 he studied electrical engineering ( he was an enthusiastic radio hobbyists ), and then physics at MIT, where he earned his bachelor's degree in 1953 at John C. Slater. Thereafter, he studied with John Bardeen at the University of Illinois at Urbana -Champaign, where he first worked on electrical conduction on semiconductor surfaces, but was then involved in research by Bardeen with Cooper on the theory of superconductivity, which at the same time his thesis was. The key idea for the mathematical treatment of Cooper pairs of electrons in the later named after the three scientists BCS theory of superconductivity he claims to be in the New York subway. After graduation, he was 1957/8 as a postdoc at the University of Birmingham with Rudolf Peierls and at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen. In 1958 he was 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 know ( Marriage 1960). In 1962 he went to the University of Pennsylvania. In 1972 he received the Nobel Prize for physics with Bardeen and Cooper. In 1980 he became a professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he was also director of the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics of the University. It dealt more with superconductivity, from the 1980s within the framework of the newly discovered high-temperature superconductivity. He became a professor at Florida State University and director of its National High Magnetic Field Laboratory in 1992.
In November 2005 he was sentenced to two years in prison because of a car accident caused by him, in which one person died and seven were injured. By his own account he had fallen asleep at the wheel, his license was confiscated but at the time of the accident.
He holds honorary doctorates from the Technical University of Munich and the University of Geneva.
Awards
Writings
- Theory of Superconductivity. Benjamin 1964
- Bonesteel, Gorkov (eds. ): Selected Papers of Robert Schrieffer. World Scientific 2002