True Genius The Life and Science of John Bardeen: The Only Winner of Two Nobel Prizes in Physics (2002) / Chapter Skim
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12 Two Nobels Are Better Than One Hole in One
12 Two Nobels Are Better Than One Hole in One
Pages 219-240
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From page 219... ...
Bernard Serin, who spent the 1958-1959 academic year at Illinois as a visiting research associate professor, observed the flow of colleagues and students who passed through Bardeen's office seeking advice. Serin later told a colleague it was like "sharing an office with Buddha." Bardeen's scientific court extended beyond the university and even beyond the physics community.
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From page 220... ...
The new arrangement did, however, promote collaboration within the many-body group. David Pines, in the office next to Bardeen's, enjoyed frequent discussions with Bardeen over the years on a wide range of many-body problems, including quantum plasmas, electrons in metals, collective excitations in solids, superconductivity, nuclear structure, compact helium liquids, and hightemperature superconductivity.
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From page 221... ...
One memorable collaboration involved John Wheatley, an experimentalist who was studying the Fermi liquid properties of 3He at low temperatures. When Bardeen learned that David Edwards of Ohio State had demonstrated that 3He can dissolve into superfluid 4He, he immediately recognized the opportunity to study a new Fermi liquid, one that he thought could become a superfluid.
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From page 222... ...
In 1962 Brian Josephson, a 23-year-old graduate student of Brian Pippard, looked into this matter carefully. His theory predicted that electron pairs in superconductors should be able to tunnel through a thin barrier separating two superconductors.
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From page 223... ...
That fall Bardeen developed a theory of superconducting tunneling based on the assumption that in the region of the barrier the electrons "are not paired and the wave function is essentially the same as in the normal state." Bardeen's paper on superconducting tunneling raised criticism from a theorist in the physics department at the University of Chicago, lames C Phillips, who felt that Bardeen's argument was unclear.
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From page 224... ...
" After learning of Giaever's tunneling experiments and having also studied recent experimental work by Hans Meissner and theoretical work by Robert Parmenter, Josephson went to Pippard with his idea that supercurrent flow might indeed be possible. Pippard had himself thought it "perfectly possible for this superconductor to infect that normal metal with superconducting pairs so that supercurrent could pass from one side to the other." But he had argued that the probability of two electrons tunneling simultaneously through an insulating barrier of the kind Giaever had used would be so small as to be unobservable.
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From page 225... ...
Bardeen's challenge came to the attention of the organizing committee of the Eighth International Low Temperature Physics Conference (LT-8) , held September 16-22, 1962, at Queen Mary's College of London University.
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From page 226... ...
Two months after Anderson and Rowell submitted their paper to Physical Review Letters Bardeen wrote to Anderson. "Your evidence, particularly the effect of a magnetic field on the supercurrent, is quite impressive." He suggested that to reconcile his view with losephson's it was necessary to take "into account the superconductive energy gain from the matrix element for pair transitions across the barrier....
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From page 227... ...
George Hatoyama of Sony Corporation, whom Bardeen had befriended on his first trip to Japan in 1953, brought a remarkable golf ball created specially for Bardeen. The gift was designed to recognize Bardeen's work on the transistor and to commemorate the many happy times Bardeen had played golf with his Sony friends.
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From page 228... ...
Heeger's discovery opened a new field of research on "lower dimensional materials, " which would be extensively studied for their nonlinear properties. These materials, in which charge is transported along long molecules, are among those that exhibit charge density and spin density waves.
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From page 229... ...
"But the second time was different because he gave us a reference, the review article that he and Bob Schrieffer wrote in Progress in Low Temperature Physics." The article, written in the late 1950s, included a discussion about the difference between B and H but the meaning was still unclear to them.
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From page 230... ...
If such a prize were to go to Leo Esaki, Ivar Giaever, and Brian Josephson, the laureates would be Japanese, Norwegian, and British. In l 967 Bardeen proposed a Nobel Prize for electron tunneling in solids, "an area that has had an extremely rapid development in recent years." He wrote to the Nobel Committee: Those I would like to nominate are Leo Esaki for his discovery of interband tunneling in semiconductors and the tunnel diode, Ivar Giaever for his experiments on tunneling through a thin oxide layer separating two metals, particularly when one or both are superconducting, and Brian D
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From page 231... ...
I'm pretty sure that John Bardeen figured out how to get the Nobel Prize awarded for superconductivity." Bardeen first learned that he had won a second Nobel Prize in physics from a Swedish journalist who called his home from New York on Thursday, October 19, 1972. "I didn't quite believe him," Bardeen said.
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From page 232... ...
" John replied, "lane and I have been going over the souvenirs of the 1956 trip which reminded us of the marvelous experience we had. It is a surprise and somewhat overwhelming to be going again after 16 years." The board of directors of the Champaign Country Club, led by George Russell, one of Bardeen's golf partners and that year's president, wrote: "I know we are expressing the feeling of all club members when we say that such a richly deserved reward couldn't happen to a nicer person." Another admirer complained in a tongue-in-cheek editorial sent to a local paper about the amount of publicity John received for the second Nobel, compared with the publicity garnered by other university employees.
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From page 233... ...
"I would be so pleased if you turned out to be that same gentleman! " Bardeen wrote back that she had probably worked with his brother Tom, who lived in Pittsburgh at that time and had children like those she described.
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From page 234... ...
They also stopped off at Murray Hill to participate in a small Bell Labs reunion dinner in honor of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the invention of the transistor. km Fisk, now president of Bell Labs, had added a note to the invitations, saying that "John Bardeen's second Nobel Prize for his work in superconductivity provides an additional reason for rejoicing at this time." When the Bardeens finally returned home, they found a letter waiting from the Wisconsin Telephone Company informing Bardeen of their intention of naming December 23, the anniversary of the day the transistor was first demonstrated to Bell Labs executives, a statewide "John Bardeen Day." "Naturally, all of us at Wisconsin Telephone are proud of the research contributions you have made for the good of mankind." Bardeen responded, "I have always had a very warm feeling for my home state, so that this very special honor is greatly appreciated." The many-body groups at Illinois and Bell Labs continued to compete with one another.
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From page 235... ...
"Poor McMilIan never knew what he did." The Bray-Allender-Bardeen paper on excitonic superconductivity caused a few more waves later that year when Phil Anderson and John Inkson wrote a critical comment on it for Physical Review Letters. Allender, Bray, and Bardeen replied that Inkson and Anderson had misunderstood the paper and had dealt with "semiconductors with different physical properties." The comment and reply were printed back to back.
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From page 236... ...
He was a favorite golf partner at both the country club and university golf course. He had a slight tremor in his hands (possibly the result of a high fever in his youth)
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From page 237... ...
His scientific renown was not an issue. Charles Slichter treasured the story about when one of Bardeen's longtime golf partners at the Champaign Country Club turned to him and said, "Say John, you know I've been meaning to ask you.
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From page 238... ...
When Bhatt finished his Ph.D. he went to work at Bell Labs, just as McMilIan had done a decade earlier and Bardeen had done after World War II.
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From page 239... ...
lohn Miller, a graduate student of lohn Tucker, Bardeen's collaborator during the mid-1980s, remembers that Bardeen was "amazingly up to date" on the latest theoretical and experimental work on charge density waves and high-temperature superconductivity. When experimenters asked Bardeen for help with interpretation or design of their experiments, he brought to bear his "really encyclopedic knowledge of solid state physics."
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From page 240... ...
"You feel more selfconfidence having received a Nobel Prize," he told a reporter. He was more likely to spend sunny afternoons on the golf course.
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