Bardeen, John

(1908–91) physicist; born in Madison, Wis. He worked as a geophysicist at Gulf Research and Development Corporation (1930–33) before obtaining a Ph.D. from Harvard (1936). He taught at the University of Minnesota (1938–41), served as a civilian physicist for the Naval Ordnance Laboratory (1941–45), then joined Bell Telephone Laboratories (1945–51). Together with Walter Brattain and William Shockley, he developed the point-contact transistor (1947), for which they shared the 1956 Nobel Prize in physics. Bardeen became a professor at the University of Illinois (1951–75); he shared a second Nobel Prize (1972) with his students Leon Cooper and J. Robert Schrieffer for the Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer (BCS) theory of superconductivity. Their research was a breakthrough in electromagnet design, and made Bardeen the first person to win the Nobel Prize for physics twice.

The following article is from The Great Soviet Encyclopedia (1979). It might be outdated or ideologically biased.

Bardeen, John

Born May 23, 1908, in Madison. American physicist, one of the founders of the theory of superconductivity.

Bardeen graduated from the University of Wisconsin (1928). From 1945 to 1951 he was an employee of Bell Telephone Laboratories and in 1951 became a professor at the University of Illinois. His basic scientific work was done on the theory of solids and the physics of low temperatures. In 1948, together with W. Brattain and W. Shockley, he made the first transistor. Bardeen was the first to construct the microscopic theory of superconductivity (1957, in collaboration with others). In 1956 he received the Nobel Prize.

WORKS

“Elektroprovodnosf metallov.” Uspekhi fizicheskikh nauk, 1941, vol. 25, no. 1.
Novoe v izuchenii sverkhprovodimosti. Moscow, 1962. (Translated from English; in collaboration with J. Schiffer.)