John Schrieffer
| John Robert Schrieffer | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Born |
May 31, 1931 Oak Park, Illinois |
| Nationality | United States |
| Fields | Physics |
| Institutions |
University of Pennsylvania University of California, Santa Barbara University of Florida Florida State University University of Birmingham |
| Alma mater |
Massachusetts Institute of Technology University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign |
| Doctoral advisor | John Bardeen |
| Notable awards | National Medal of Science (1983) Nobel Prize for Physics (1972) (1968) |
John Robert Schrieffer (born May 31, 1931) is an American physicist who, with John Bardeen and Leon N Cooper, was a recipient of the 1972 Nobel Prize in Physics for developing the BCS theory, the first successful quantum theory of superconductivity.
Schrieffer was born in Oak Park, Illinois, and 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 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.
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