Word: osheroff
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Cornell University researchers David Lee, Robert Richardson and Douglas Osheroff made their Nobel-winning discovery in 1972. They were working with helium-3, a rare isotope of the common gas, looking for a "phase transition," analogous to the changes in water when it turns from vapor to liquid and from liquid to ice. They had cooled a sample to within two one-thousandths of a degree of absolute zero (-459.67[degrees] F), the temperature at which atomic motion ceases...
...they were charting the changing pressures, the Nobel citation states, "it was Osheroff's vigilant eye that noticed small extra jumps in the curve." Those jumps, it turned out, represented the change of helium-3 into a superfluid, a liquid with no viscosity that can climb up and over the walls of its container and exhibits other bizarre quantum behavior ordinarily observed only in subatomic particles...
STOCKHOLM, Sweden: Three American physicists will share the 1996 Nobel Prize in their field for work on the physical properties of supercooled helium. David Lee and Robert Richardson of Cornell University and Douglas Osheroff of Stanford discovered in the early 1970s that at very low temperatures, helium-3 demonstrates characteristics of superfluidity Scot Woods