Bardeen, John (1908-1991)

US physicist. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1956, with Walter Brattain and William Shockley, for the development of the transistor in 1948 and he became the first double winner of the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1972 (with Leon Cooper and Robert Schrieffer) for his work on superconductivity.

Bardeen was born in Madison, Wisconsin, and educated at the University Wisconsin. At the Bell Telephone laboratory, New Jersey, 1945-51, in a team with Shockley and Brattain, Bardeen studied semiconductors, especially germanium, used in radar receivers in the same way that crystals had been used in the earliest radio sets. The work led to the development of the transistor in 1956. The second Nobel Prize was won for explaining superconductivity, the total loss of electrical resistance by some metals when cooled within a few degrees of absolute zero. The theory developed in 1957 by Bardeen, Schrieffer, and Cooper states that superconductivity arises when electrons travelling through a metal interact with the vibrating atoms of the metal.