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Ethnically, I come from a
mixed family. My father was the son of Jewish immigrants who left Russia shortly
after the turn of the century, and my mother was the daughter of a Lutheran minister
whose parents were from what is now Slovakia. Mostly, however, I grew up in a
medical family. My father's father and all his children either became physicians
or married them. My parents had met in New York where my father was a medical
intern and my mother was a nurse. At the end of World War II, my parents settled
in Aberdeen, a small logging town on the west coast of Washington State, where
medical doctors were in short supply. Surrounded by natural beauty, it was a perfect
place to raise a family, and I was the second of five children.
To
this day I grow pale at the sight of blood, and never for a moment considered
a career in medicine. Despite this, my father, who was usually engrossed in his
medical career, inspired in me passions for both photography and gardening, which
were his hobbies when time permitted, as they are mine. Natural science interested
me intensely from a very early age. When I was six I began tearing my toys apart
to play with the electric motors. From then on, my free hours were occupied by
a myriad of mechanical, chemical and electrical projects, culminating in the construction
of a 100 keV X-ray machine during my senior year in high school.
My projects often involved an element of danger, but my parents never seemed too
concerned, nor did they inhibit me. Once a muzzle loading rifle I had built went
off in the house, putting a hole through two walls. On another occasion a make-shift
acetylene 'miners' lamp blew up on my chemistry bench in the basement, embedding
shards of glass in the side of my face, narrowly missing my right eye. With blood
running down my face, I came up the stairs cupping my hands to keep the blood
off the carpet. My mother was by then at the top of the stairs. Knowing my propensity
for practical jokes, she exclaimed loudly "If you're kidding I'll kill you! "
As usual, my father lectured me about safety as he sewed the larger wounds closed,
and there was always an unspoken understanding that that particular phase of my
experimentation was over.
In high school I was a good student, but
only really excelled in physics and chemistry classes. While I liked physics much
more than chemistry, the chemistry teacher, William Hock, had spent quite a bit
of time telling us what physical research was all about (as opposed to my experimentation),
and that effort made a deep impression on my young mind. My interest in experimentation
helped me to develop excellent technical skills, but I did not feel motivated
to do independent reading in those areas of physics or chemistry associated with
my projects. I was intellectually rather lazy, and in high school I would always
take one free class period so that I could get my homework out of the way, freeing
the evenings for my many projects.
My parents were generous, and
the home for me was filled with scientific toys and gadgets. In addition, their
children were allowed to attend any university to which they could get admitted.
I chose Caltech over Stanford to avoid a continuing comparison of my academic
record with that of my older brother, then a Stanford undergraduate.
It was a good time to be at Caltech, as Feynman was teaching his famous undergraduate
course. This two-year sequence was an extremely important part of my education.
Although I cannot say that I understood it all, I think it contributed most to
the development of my physical intuition. The Feynman problem sets were very challenging,
but I had the good fortune to know Ernest Ma, who was an undergraduate one year
ahead of me. Ernest would never tell me how to solve problems, but would give
obscure hints when I got stuck, at least they seemed obscure to me at the time.
It was a shock to suddenly have to work so hard in my studies. I had the
most trouble in math, and only through considerable trauma did I gradually improve
my performance from a grade of C+ to A+ over a three-year period. Years later,
when Caltech was offering me a faculty position, I confided that I did not have
a very illustrious career as an undergraduate. To this remark the division chair
replied "That's OK Doug, we are not hiring you to be an undergraduate."
The pressure at Caltech was extreme, and I am not sure I would have survived
had I not joined a group of undergraduates working with Gerry Neugebauer on his
famous infra-red star survey during my junior year. This experience made me recognize
how satisfying research could be, and how different it was from doing endless
problem sets. In my senior year, in order to get out of a third term of senior
physics lab, I also began working in David Goodstein's low temperature lab (David
was in Italy). Two professors, Don McCullum from U.C. Riverside and Walter Ogier
from Pamona College, were spending their sabbatical leaves there trying to reach
a temperature of 0.5K by pumping on a helium bath in which the superfluid film
had been carefully controlled. They filled my mind with the wonders of the low
temperature world, and I decided I would go into solid state physics.
I chose to attend Cornell for graduate school largely because it was so far away
from the Pasadena smog. In the end, it was a good choice, and a good time to be
at Cornell. Soon after my arrival I met two people who were to become very important
in my life. While still looking for housing, I met Phyllis Liu, a pretty young
woman from Taiwan, who had also just arrived in Ithaca. We dated a bit, but then
she found herself too busy with her studies for such diversions. We met again
three years later, and were married in August, 1970, two weeks after she obtained
her Ph.D. The other person was David Lee, the head of the low temperature laboratory
at Cornell and the professor under whom I was to work as a teaching assistant
my first year. Dave seemed to think that I was bright, and encouraged me to join
the low temperature group.
Low temperature physics seemed even more
exciting at Cornell than it had been at Caltech. New technologies and interesting
physics made the field easy to choose, and I found myself thoroughly enjoying
every minute of my work. In the spring of my fourth year Dave Lee asked me to
talk to the Bell Labs recruiter, who came to campus in the fall and spring of
each year. I was not ready to graduate, but we talked a bit, especially about
making tiny electrical plugs to be used throughout the Bell Telephone system.
It seemed interesting to me, although not really physics. In the fall, Dave suggested
I start interviewing in earnest. I first talked with General Electric, who seemed
to have no jobs whatsoever. I then talked to Bell Labs again, but this time to
a new recruiter, Venky Narayanamurti, who had recently received his Ph.D. in physics
at Cornell. Venky was enthusiastic about what I was doing, and felt that I might
be able to get a postdoc doing Raman spectroscopy. I didn't confess that I knew
nothing about the subject.
We discovered our mysterious phase transitions
in my Pomeranchuk cell in November 1971, and almost by magic, Venky called me
up in early December with good news. The hiring freeze which had been in place
for almost two years at Bell had been lifted. How soon could I be ready to come
down for a job interview? I told Venky that we had stumbled on to something that
was pretty exciting, and we fixed the date: January 6, 1972.
At Bell
Labs, a job interview began with a thesis defence, and it could at times turn
nasty. I was lucky that no one questioned my association of the A and B features
with the solid. In particular, Dick Werthamer was in the audience, and he had
done early work on the p-wave BCS state soon to be associated with the B phase.
I think my enthusiasm carried the day, and ultimately Bell Labs offered me not
a postdoc position in Raman spectroscopy, but a permanent position which would
allow me to continue my studies on 3He.
Phyllis and I
moved to New Jersey in September, 1972; Phyllis to a postdoc position at Princeton
University, and I to Bell Laboratories at Murray Hill. This was the golden era
at Bell Labs. The importance of the transistor, invented in the research area
there, made management extremely supportive of basic research. The only requirement
was that work done should be 'good physics' in that it changed the way we thought
about nature in some important way. I joined the Department of Solid State and
Low Temperature Research under the direction of C. C. Grimes, and began purchasing
the equipment I would need to continue what I by then knew were studies of superfluidity
in 3He. Some instrumentation was even purchased before I arrived in
New Jersey. Yet I knew it would take at least a year to set up my laboratory,
and I feared that most of the important pioneering work would be done before my
own lab became operational.
I was surprised to find that by the time
my laboratory did become operational, few of the studies that interested me had
been done. Indeed, there seemed to be some question as to whether or not these
new phases were all p-wave BCS states. In addition, theorists Phil Anderson and
Bill Brinkman at Bell Labs had become interested in the theory of superfluid 3He.
This set the stage for what was to be an extremely productive period in my career.
Over a five year period, beginning in 1973, we measured many of the important
characteristics of the superfluid phases which helped identify the microscopic
states involved. We found the superfluid phases to be almost unbelievably complex,
and at the same time extremely well described by the BCS theory and extensions
to that theory developed during that period.
In about 1977 I began
to feel pressure from Bell Laboratories management to go on to study other physical
systems. I decided to study solid 3He, my original thesis topic, and
at the same time Gerry Dolan and I began a modest program to test some of the
ideas that David Thouless had discussed on electron localization in disordered
one-dimensional systems. This latter study had to fit within the extremely slow
time scale of the solid 3He work. By late 1979, both of these efforts
had succeeded beyond my wildest expectations. We discovered antiferromagnet resonance
in nuclear spin ordered solid 3He samples which we grew from the superfluid
phase directly into the spin-ordered solid phase. At the same time, the low temperature
group at the University of Florida also discovered these resonances, but because
we cooled our samples by adiabatic nuclear demagnetization of copper rather than
Pomeranchuk cooling, only we were able to form and study single crystals, and
could thus identify the allowed magnetic domain orientations. In the end, Mike
Cross, Daniel Fisher and I were able to determine the symmetry of the magnetic
sub-lattice structure, and correctly guessed the precise ordered structure, later
confirmed by polarized neutron scattering. The frequency shifts resulting from
this antiferromagnetic resonance have made solid 3He an extremely useful
model magnetic system, and to understand them theoretically, we had borrowed some
of the same formalism which Leggett used to understand the frequency shifts in
superfluid 3He.
At almost the same time that Cross, Fisher
and I made our breakthrough in our solid 3He studies, Dolan and I discovered
the log(T) temperature dependence to the electrical resistivity in disordered
2D conductors which Phil Anderson and his 'gang of four' had just predicted would
exist, as a result of what they termed 'weak localization'. I did not continue
the work on weak localization, as I only had one cryostat, and to do so would
have meant that I could not continue my studies on nuclear spin ordering in solid
3He, since the two sets of experiments would have vastly different
time scales. Somewhat ironically, I got a second cryostat two years later.
In 1987, after fifteen years, I left Bell Laboratories to accept a position
at Stanford University. I had received informal offers of university positions
periodically while at Bell Labs, but always found Bell to be the ideal place to
do research. The combination of in-house support for basic science and first rate
collaborators made Bell Labs unbeatable as an environment for doing research.
However, my wife recognized in me a teacher waiting to be born. In addition, she
was not happy with her job in New Jersey, and we agreed that she would apply for
positions elsewhere. When she received offers from two biotech companies in California,
Amgen and Genentech, I suggested that she accept the Genentech offer and that
I would start talking to Stanford and U.C. Berkeley. Stanford, which has a small
physics department, had just begun a search for a low temperature physicist. Ultimately,
I received offers from both institutions, and chose Stanford because we liked
the atmosphere better, and it was a better commute for Phyllis.
At
Stanford my students and I have continued work on superfluid and solid 3He,
studying how the B superfluid phase is nucleated from the higher temperature A
phase and diverse properties of magnetically ordered solid 3He in two
and three dimensions. In addition, we have developed a program to study the low
temperature properties of amorphous solids. Our work has shown that interactions
between active defects in these systems create a hole in the density of states
vs. local field, just as is seen in spin-glasses. In amorphous materials, it may
be possible to measure the size of coupled clusters of such defects, something
which has been difficult in spin-glasses.
I have thoroughly enjoyed
all aspects of university life, except for having to apply for research support.
In particular, I have been fortunate to have had excellent graduate students,
and to be able to teach bright undergraduates. Of course, with undergraduates
one always has a few students who do not appreciate the professor's efforts. In
1988, after teaching my first large lecture course, one student wrote in his course
evaluation: "Osheroff is a typical example of some lunkhead from industry who
Stanford University hires for his expertise in some random field." Despite this
minority opinion, in 1991 Stanford presented me their Gores Award for excellence
in teaching. From 1993-1996 I served as Physics Department chair, and stepped
down in September 1996, hoping to spend more time with my graduate students. The
day I learned I was to receive the Nobel Prize, after just two and a half hours
sleep the night before, I taught my class on the physics of photography, although
the lecture was not on photographic lenses, but the discovery of superfluidity
in 3He.
From Les Prix Nobel. The Nobel Prizes 1996, Editor Tore Frängsmyr, [Nobel Foundation], Stockholm, 1997
This autobiography/biography was written at the time of the award and later published in the book series Les Prix Nobel/Nobel Lectures. The information is sometimes updated with an addendum submitted by the Laureate. To cite this document, always state the source as shown above.
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