John Robert Schrieffer (born May 31, 1931) is an American
physicist and winner, with John Bardeen and Leon Neil
Cooper, of the 1972 Nobel Prize for Physics
for developing the BCS theory (for their initials), the first successful microscopic theory
of superconductivity.
He was born in Oak Park, Illinois, but his family moved in 1940 to Manhasset, New
York, and then in 1947 to Eustis, Florida, where his father a former pharmaceutical salesman began a career in the citrus
industry. In his Florida days, Schrieffer enjoyed playing with homemade rockets and ham radio, a hobby that sparked an interest
in electrical engineering.
After graduating from Eustis High School in 1949, Schrieffer was admitted to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where for two years he majored in
electrical engineering before switching to physics in his junior year. He completed a bachelor's thesis on multiplets in heavy
atoms under the direction of John C. Slater in 1953. Pursuing an interest in solid-state
physics, Schrieffer began graduate studies at the University of
Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he was hired immediately as a research assistant to John Bardeen. After working out a
theoretical problem of electrical conduction on semiconductor surfaces, Schrieffer spent a year in the laboratory, applying the
theory to several surface problems. In his third year of graduate studies, he joined Bardeen and Leon Cooper in developing the
theory of superconductivity.
Schrieffer recalls that in January 1957 he was on a subway in New York City when he had an idea of how to describe
mathematically the ground state of superconducting atoms. Schrieffer and Bardeen’s collaborator Cooper had discovered that
electrons in a superconductor are grouped in pairs, now called Cooper pairs, and that the
motions of all Cooper pairs within a single superconductor are correlated and function as a single entity. Schrieffer’s
mathematical breakthrough was to describe the behavior of all Cooper pairs at the same time instead of each individual pair. The
day after returning to Illinois, Schrieffer showed his equations to Bardeen who immediately realized they were the solution to
the problem. The BCS theory (Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer) of superconductivity, as it is now known, accounted for more than 30
years of experimental results that had stymied some of the greatest theorists in physics.
After completing his doctoral dissertation on the theory of superconductivity, Schrieffer spent the 1957-58 academic year as a
National Science Foundation fellow at the University of Birmingham in England and at the Niels
Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, where he continued research into superconductivity. Following a year as assistant professor
at the University of Chicago, he returned to the University of Illinois in 1959 as a faculty member. In 1960, he went back to the
Bohr Institute for a summer visit, during which he became engaged to Anne Grete Thomsen whom he married at Christmas of that
year. Two years later, Schrieffer joined the faculty of the University of
Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, and, in 1964, Schrieffer published
his book on the BCS theory, Theory of Superconductivity.
In 1972, Schrieffer along with John Bardeen and Leon Cooper won the 1972 Nobel Prize in Physics for developing the BCS theory.
In 1980, Schrieffer became a professor at the University of California,
Santa Barbara, and rose to chancellor professor in 1984, serving as director of the university’s Institute for Theoretical Physics. In 1992, Florida State
University appointed Schrieffer as a university eminent scholar professor and chief scientist of the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory, where he continued to pursue one of the
great goals in physics: room temperature superconductivity.
Schrieffer was sentenced to two years in prison November
6, 2005 for causing a car crash that killed one person
and injured seven others. At the time of the accident his license was under suspension. The accident occurred in Orcutt on September 24, 2004.
[1]As of September
26, 2006 Schrieffer is incarcerated in R.J. Donovan Correctional Facility San Diego, California.
External links
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