• Nobel Laureate Lectures at the Bibliotheca Alexandrina

Douglas D. OSHEROFF

An American physicist, he was the co-recipient of the 1996 Nobel Prize for Physics for the discovery of superfluidity in the isotope helium-3, along with David Lee and Robert Richardson.

Prof. Osheroff was a graduate student working with Lee and Richardson in the low-temperature laboratory at Cornell. The team investigated the properties of helium-3 under temperatures of just a few thousandths of a degree above absolute zero (-273 C). Osheroff noticed minute jumps in the internal pressure of the sample of helium-3 under investigation, and he drew the team"s attention to these small deviations. The researchers eventually concluded that the helium-3 had undergone a phase transition to a superfluid state, in which a liquid"s atoms lose their randomness and move about in a coordinated manner. Such a substance lacks all internal friction, flows without resistance, and behaves according to quantum mechanical laws rather than to those of classical fluid mechanics. The discovery of superfluidity in helium-3 enabled scientists to study directly in macroscopic–or visible-systems the quantum mechanical effects that had previously been studied only indirectly in molecules, atoms, and subatomic particles.

Prof. Osheroff received a bachelor"s degree (1967) from the California Institute of Technology and a doctorate (1973) from Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y. He conducted research at Bell Telephone Laboratories from 1972 to 1982, and headed solid-state and low-temperature research there from 1982 to 1987. He became a professor at Stanford (Calif.) University in 1987.

“Attendance is open to the public free of charge”
“The lecture is in English with simultaneous translation into Arabic”