Robert Coleman Richardson

Robert Coleman Richardson (born June 26, 1937 in Washington D.C.) is an American experimental physicist whose area of research includes sub-millikelvin temperature studies of helium-3. Richardson, along with David Lee, as senior researchers, and then graduate student Douglas Osheroff, shared the 1996 Nobel Prize in Physics for their 1972 discovery of the property of superfluidity in helium-3 atoms in the Cornell University Laboratory of Atomic an... more

Robert Coleman Richardson (born June 26, 1937 in Washington D.C.) is an American experimental physicist whose area of research includes sub-millikelvin temperature studies of helium-3. Richardson, along with David Lee, as senior researchers, and then graduate student Douglas Osheroff, shared the 1996 Nobel Prize in Physics for their 1972 discovery of the property of superfluidity in helium-3 atoms in the Cornell University Laboratory of Atomic and Solid State Physics. He is currently the Floyd Newman Professor of Physics and Vice Provost for Research at Cornell University, although he no longer operates a laboratory. His past experimental work focused on using Nuclear Magnetic Resonance to study the quantum properties of liquids and solids at extremely low temperatures. Richardson attended Virginia Tech and received a B.S. in 1958 and a M.S. in 1960. He received his PhD from Duke University in 1965. He is an Eagle Scout. There are four known eagle scouts among the Nobel Prize... less