John Robert Schrieffer

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John Robert Schrieffer
University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign
Known for	BCS theory Schrieffer–Wolff transformation SSH model Paramagnons
Awards	Oliver E. Buckley Condensed Matter Prize (1968) Comstock Prize in Physics (1968) Nobel Prize in Physics (1972) Fritz London Memorial Prize (1974) National Medal of Science (1983)
Scientific career
Fields	Condensed matter physics
Institutions	University of Pennsylvania University of California, Santa Barbara University of Florida Florida State University University of Birmingham University of Chicago
Thesis	The theory of superconductivity (1964)
Doctoral advisor	John Bardeen

John Robert Schrieffer (/ˈʃriːfər/; May 31, 1931 – July 27, 2019)^[1] was an American physicist who, with John Bardeen and Leon Cooper, was a recipient of the 1972 Nobel Prize in Physics for developing the BCS theory, the first successful quantum theory of superconductivity.

Life and career

Schrieffer was born in Oak Park, Illinois, the son of Louise (Anderson) and John Henry Schrieffer.^[2] 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

, where he was hired immediately as a research assistant to 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 Cooper in developing the theory of superconductivity.

Schrieffer recalled 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 electrons. 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 due to phonon-electron interactions. 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 1957–1958 academic year as a

the same year.

Schrieffer was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1970 and the United States National Academy of Sciences in 1971.^[4][5] In 1972, he, along with Bardeen and Cooper, won the 1972 Nobel Prize in Physics for developing the BCS theory. Schrieffer was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1975.^[6] 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 Kavli 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.

On September 24, 2004, while driving with a suspended license, Schrieffer was involved in an automobile accident that killed one person and injured seven others.^[1] Schrieffer was said to have fallen asleep at the wheel of his car. On November 6, 2005, he was sentenced to two years in

He died in late July 2019 at a nursing facility in Florida while sleeping. He was 88 years old.[1]

See also

• List of Nobel laureates affiliated with the University of California, Santa Barbara

References

External links

• Robert Schrieffer on Nobelprize.org including the Nobel Lecture, December 11, 1972 Macroscopic Quantum Phenomena from Pairing in Superconductors