Douglas D. Osheroff

1996 Nobel Prize for Physics

Douglas Osheroff was born and raised in Aberdeen, Washington, a logging town in the Pacific Northwest of the U.S. He attended public schools and completed his undergraduate work at Caltech, receiving a B.S. in physics in 1967. He did his graduate work at Cornell University, where his Ph.D. thesis work resulted in the discovery of three superfluid phases of liquid helium-3.

After completing his Ph.D in the fall of 1972, he spent the next fifteen years in the physical research division at AT&T Bell Laboratories, the last six as the head of their Low Temperature and Solid State Research Department. Here, he worked on the newly-discovered superfluid phases of liquid helium-3, the nature of nuclear spin order in solid helium-3, and made the first observations of weak localization in thin disordered metallic films.

In 1987 he came to Stanford University, where he became the “J.G. Jackson and C.J. Wood Professor of Physics” as well as the “Gerhard Casper University Fellow for Undergraduate Education.” He also served as chair of the Physics Department at Stanford from 1993-96, and again from 2001-2004. His research at the university focuses on the properties of condensed matter near the absolute zero of temperature.

In 1996, he shared Nobel Prize for Physics for the discovery of superfluidity in helium-3 with David M. Lee and Robert C. Richardson, his two faculty mentors at Cornell.

Research Activities and Interests: Solid State, Low-Temperature Physics, Quantum fluids and solids at ultra low temperatures. Weak localization. Low temperature properties of glasses. Low temperature properties of solids.