Stanford University Department of Physics - Nobel Prize: Douglas Osheroff

Professor Douglas Osheroff Wins Nobel Prize in Physics

We are extremely pleased to report that Douglas Osheroff, the J.G. Jackson and C.J. Wood Professor of Physics at Stanford, has been awarded the 1996 Nobel Prize in Physics. He shares the prize with two colleagues from Cornell University for their discovery of superfluidity in helium-3.

As a graduate student at Cornell in the early 1970's, Osheroff and his thesis advisors, David M. Lee and Robert C. Richardson, discovered the first of three superfluid phases of liquid helium-3, at a temperature only about two-thousandths of a degree above absolute zero. Osheroff is a leader in the study of superfluidity and of the properties of thin superconducting films. He served as Chair of the Physics Department from 1993 until August, 1996. The Nobel Prize caps a long list of awards Osheroff has received. A member of the National Academy of Sciences, he has won the Simon Memorial Prize, the Oliver Buckley Prize, and was named a MacArthur Fellow. Osheroff also won a Walter J. Gores Award for Excellence in Teaching. Osheroff is the fourth Nobel Prize winner in the Stanford Physics Department and the seventh within the Stanford community. The complete list of Physics Nobel Prize Winners from Stanford is currently:

Douglas Osheroff, 1996
Martin Perl, 1995
Richard Taylor, 1990
Arthur Schawlow, 1981
Burton Richter, 1976
Robert Hofstadter, 1961
Felix Bloch, 1952

You can also read the article printed in the Stanford Daily.

Physics Nobel Prize Winners

Stanford Physics Nobel Prize winners (left to right) Richard Taylor, Douglas Osheroff, Burton Richter, and Martin Perl.

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