Archives acquires papers of Nobel laureate Doug Osheroff
The University Archives is pleased to announce that it has acquired and quickly processed the papers of Nobel laureate Doug Osheroff, professor of physics.
The papers consist of early laboratory notebooks from 1969-1987. They document Osheroff's work at the Laboratory of Atomic and Solid State Physics at Cornell University as a graduate student, doing research in low-temperature physics. Together with David Lee, the head of the laboratory, and Robert C. Richardson, Osheroff used a Pomeranchuk cell to investigate the behaviour of 3He at temperatures within a few thousandths of a degree of absolute zero. They discovered unexpected effects in their measurements, which they eventually explained as phase transitions to a superfluid phase of 3He. Lee, Richardson and Osheroff were jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1996 for this discovery. The notebooks also document Osheroff's later work at Bell Labs in Murray Hill, New Jersey, where he continued to research low-temperature phenomena in 3He.