HMC Physics Colloquium

Tuesdays at 16:30 in Shanahan Center for Teaching and Learning, Room B460

Douglas Osheroff

Stanford University

The Discovery of Superfluid :mil:`\mathrm{He}^3` as Seen Through the Eyes of a Graduate Student

Nov. 28, 2005

It was at the beginning of his fifth year of graduate study that Douglas Osheroff discovered evidence for the existence of two unexpected phase transitions in a mixture of liquid and solid He3, both within three thousandths of a degree of absolute zero. The speaker will describe this event, and give his personal account of the excitement and confusion that ensued over the next seven months as he and his two professors sought to understand the origins of these transitions and the nature of the ordered states.