Leon Cooper

Leon Cooper is an American physicist who shared the 1972 Nobel Prize in Physics with John Bardeen and Robert Schrieffer for developing the theory of superconductivity.

John Bardeen: John Bardeen was an American physicist who shared two Nobel Prizes in Physics, including the 1972 prize for the theory of superconductivity. Cooper and Bardeen jointly developed the theory that Schrieffer completed.
Cooper pair: A Cooper pair is a pair of electrons correlated through an effective attraction, often mediated by lattice vibrations. Cooper’s 1956 calculation showed that even weak attraction can bind electrons near a Fermi surface.
Cooper instability: The Cooper instability is the tendency of a Fermi sea to form bound pairs when any weak attractive interaction acts between electrons. Cooper identified this instability in his 1956 analysis of electrons above a filled Fermi sea.
Superfluidity: Superfluidity is frictionless flow in a quantum fluid, accompanied by macroscopic quantum coherence. Cooper pairing helped inspire comparisons between superconducting electron pairs and paired atoms in superfluids.
Robert Schrieffer: Robert Schrieffer was an American physicist who shared the 1972 Nobel Prize in Physics for the theory of superconductivity. His wavefunction supplied the many-particle framework for the theory Cooper and Bardeen developed.
BCS theory: BCS theory is the microscopic theory of conventional superconductivity developed by Bardeen, Cooper, and Schrieffer. Cooper’s two-electron result became the central pairing mechanism in the full theory.
Superconductivity: Superconductivity is a state of matter with zero electrical resistance and magnetic-field expulsion below a critical temperature. Explaining this state was the problem that motivated Cooper’s work with Bardeen and Schrieffer.
High-temperature superconductivity: High-temperature superconductivity is superconductivity occurring at temperatures above those typical of conventional metallic superconductors. Its pairing mechanism remains distinct from the conventional phonon-mediated account Cooper helped establish.
John Robert Schrieffer: John Robert Schrieffer is the full name of American physicist Robert Schrieffer. This is an alternate name for Cooper’s Nobel co-laureate, not a separate collaborator.
Fermi surface: A Fermi surface is the boundary in momentum space between occupied and unoccupied electron states at zero temperature. The Cooper instability arises from electrons near this boundary.

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Yoichiro NambuRelated: Cooper pairing was central to the superconductivity analogy Nambu used in his particle-physics work.