Robert Coleman Richardson

Richardson, Robert Coleman, 1937–, American physicist, b. Washington, D.C. Ph.D. Duke Univ., 1966. Richardson has been a professor at Cornell since 1966. He was co-recipient with Douglas Osheroff and David Lee of the 1996 Nobel Prize in Physics for their discovery that a rare isotope of helium with only one neutron, known as helium-3, exhibits superfluidity at extremely low temperatures. Conducted in the early 1970s at Cornell, the research showed that helium-3 becomes superfluid at a temperature much lower than the normal helium isotope, helium-4, and that the key to the transition is the magnetic behavior of helium-3 rather than its hydrodynamics. The work was considered a breakthrough in low-temperature physics.

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