David Lee (physicist)

David Morris Lee is an American physicist who shared the 1996 Nobel Prize in Physics for discovering superfluidity in helium-3.

Robert C. Richardson: An American physicist who shared the 1996 Nobel Prize in Physics for discovering superfluidity in helium-3. Richardson collaborated with Lee and Osheroff on the experiments that revealed helium-3 superfluidity.
Helium-3: A stable helium isotope whose nucleus contains two protons and one neutron. This isotope becomes superfluid only at very low temperatures and was the substance in Lee’s experiment.
Dilution refrigerator: A cryogenic device that reaches millikelvin temperatures by circulating a mixture of helium-3 and helium-4. The Cornell apparatus cooled helium-3 into the regime where its superfluid transitions appeared.
BCS theory: A theory explaining superconductivity through the formation of paired electrons. Helium-3’s paired atoms provide a neutral-fluid counterpart to pairing ideas developed for superconductors.
Douglas Osheroff: An American physicist who shared the 1996 Nobel Prize in Physics for discovering superfluidity in helium-3. Osheroff detected the anomalous pressure changes that led Lee’s group to identify the transition.
Superfluidity: A phase of matter that flows without ordinary viscosity and exhibits macroscopic quantum behavior. Lee’s Nobel-recognized result was the discovery of this phenomenon in helium-3.
Pomeranchuk cooling: A cooling technique based on the unusual entropy of solid helium-3 under pressure. The group used pressure-driven cooling associated with solid helium-3 to reach extremely low temperatures.
Cooper pair: A bound or correlated pair of fermions that can form a collective quantum state. Helium-3 atoms pair to produce its superfluid phases, much as electrons pair in superconductors.
Cornell University: A private research university in Ithaca, New York, founded in 1865. Lee and his collaborators made their helium-3 discovery in Cornell’s low-temperature physics laboratory.
B-phase of helium-3: The low-temperature superfluid phase of helium-3 with an isotropic energy gap and paired atoms. One of the phases identified in the experiments is the B phase.

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