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Douglas Osheroff
discovery of superfluidity in helium-3.
That Oct. 9 call came 24 years after Osheroff himself made a portentous
middle-of-the-night call about the
discovery that eventually would lead to the Nobel. On April 20, 1972,
graduate student Osheroff was working with physicists David Lee and
Robert Richardson in the ultra-low-temperature lab at Cornell
University, exploring an unexpected behavior of helium-3, an uncommon
isotope of the element helium.
At 2:40 that morning, Osheroff jotted a line in his lab notebook
indicating that he and his advisers had found something extremely
significant: the point at which helium-3 changes from an ordinary liquid
into an extraordinary substance called a superfluid. When it is a
superfluid, a liquid moves without any resistance: It is arguably the
closest thing to perpetual motion that occurs in nature.
Before that night, superfluidity had been discovered in only one other
liquid, helium-4, though researchers had looked for this condition in
helium-3 without success.
“I still get goose bumps just thinking about it,” recalls Osheroff, 51,
now the J.G. Jackson and C.J. Wood Professor of Physics. “It was an
exciting moment. There was absolutely nobody else in the entire building
to share my discovery with. So I waited an hour, until I couldn’t stand
it any longer, and then I called my advisers.”
Those advisers, Lee and Richardson, shared the Nobel with Osheroff.
Osheroff’s journey toward the prize began in Aberdeen, a small logging
town in Washington state, where he was born and raised, the son of a
doctor and a nurse.
“I think I was genetically predisposed to become a scientist,” Osheroff
says. “As a child, I got into all kinds of things, many of which would
get me into trouble with the FBI today.”
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