Physicist — John Bardeen (Madison, 1908 – Boston, 1991) was an American physicist, the only person to have won the Nobel Prize in Physics twice. Trained in engineering and then in mathematical physics at Princeton, he worked at Bell Laboratories and later at the University of Illinois. In 1947, together with Walter Brattain and William Shockley, he invented the transistor, the semiconductor device that replaced vacuum tubes and gave rise to all of modern electronics and computing: for this he received the Nobel Prize in 1956. In 1957, with Leon Cooper and Robert Schrieffer, he formulated the BCS theory of superconductivity, which explains at the microscopic level how, at very low temperatures, electrons pair up (Cooper pairs) and electrical resistance vanishes: this earned him his second Nobel Prize in 1972. Few scientists have had such a profound impact on technology and solid-state physics.
Trivia
He is the only person to have received two Nobel Prizes in the same field, physics: one for the transistor (1956) and one for the theory of superconductivity (1972).
Theories and contributions
- Transistor — A semiconductor device for amplifying and switching electrical signals (1947), the foundation of modern electronics and computing.
- BCS theory of superconductivity — Electrons form Cooper pairs mediated by phonons and condense into a zero-resistance state below a critical temperature .
Featured in chapters
Linked atoms
2 linked atoms.