Nobel laureate to give physics lecture Feb. 27 at IUB

The title of his lecture will be “So, What Really Happens at Absolute Zero?”

Osheroff is a professor of physics and applied physics at Stanford University.

Osheroff, David Lee and Robert Richardson discovered at the beginning of the 1970s, in the low-temperature laboratory at Cornell University, that the helium isotope, helium-3, could be made superfluid at a temperature only about two thousandths of a degree above absolute zero. This superfluid quantum liquid differed greatly from the one already discovered in the 1930s and studied at about two degrees (i.e. a thousand times) higher temperature in the normal helium isotope, helium-4. The new quantum liquid helium-3 has very special characteristics, among them the ability to show that the quantum laws of microphysics also sometimes directly govern the behavior of macroscopic bodies.