Bardeen, John

SUBJECT AREA: Electricity, Electronics and information technology

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b. 23 May 1908 Madison, Wisconsin, USA

d. 30 January 1991 Boston, Massachusetts, USA

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American physicist, the first to win the Nobel Prize for Physics twice.

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Born the son of a professor of anatomy, he studied electrical engineering at the University of Wisconsin. He then worked for three years as a geophysicist at the Gulf Research Laboratories before taking a PhD in mathematical physics at Princeton, where he was a graduate student. For some time he held appointments at the University of Minnesota and at Harvard, and during the Second World War he joined the US Naval Ordnance Laboratory. In 1945 he joined the Bell Telephone Laboratories to head a new department to work on solid-state devices. While there, he and W.H. Brattain in 1948 published a paper that introduced the transistor. For this he, Brattain and Shockley won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1956. In 1951 he moved to the University of Illinois as Professor of Physics and Electrical Engineering. There he worked on superconductivity, a phenomenon described in 1911 by Kamerling-Onnes. Bardeen worked with L.N. Cooper and J.A.Schrieffer, and in 1972 they were awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics for the "BCS Theory", which suggested that, under certain circumstances at very low temperatures, electrons can form bound pairs.

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Principal Honours and Distinctions

Nobel Prize for Physics (jointly with Brattain and Shockley) 1956, (jointly with Cooper and Schrieffer) 1972.

Further Reading

Isaacs and E.Martin (eds), 1985, Longmans Dictionary of 20th Century Biography.

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