Schrieffer, John Robert (1931– )

US physicist who, with John Bardeen and Leon Cooper, was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1972 for developing the first satisfactory theory of superconductivity (the resistance-free flow of electrical current which occurs in many metals and metallic compounds at very low temperatures). He has also worked on ferromagnetism, surface physics, and dilute alloys.

In 1956 Cooper showed that, at low temperatures, electrons in a metal can weakly attract one another by distorting the lattice of metal atoms, forming a bound pair. In 1957 Bardeen, Cooper, and Schrieffer showed that these bound pairs of electrons can move through the metal without resistance. This theory of superconductivity (called the BCS theory) is amazingly complete and explains all known phenomena associated with superconductivitity in metals and alloys (except the high-temperature superconducting ceramics discovered in the late 1980s).

Schrieffer was born at Oak Park, Illinois, USA. He studied engineering and physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and the University of Illinois, where he worked under Bardeen for his doctorate (awarded in 1957) on superconductivity. Schrieffer became professor of physics at the University of Pennsylvania in 1964.