Bardeen, John (1908-1991)

US physicist who won a Nobel prize 1956, with Walter Brattain and William Shockley, for the development of the transistor 1948. In 1972 he became the first double winner of a Nobel prize in the same subject (with Leon Cooper and Robert Schrieffer (1931- ) for his work on superconductivity. At the Bell Telephone laboratory, New Jersey, 1945-51, in a team with Shockley and Brattain, Bardeen studied semiconductors, especially germanium, used in radar receivers in the same way that crystals had been used in the earliest radio sets. The work led to the development 1956 of the transistor. The second Nobel prize was won for explaining superconductivity, the total loss of electrical resistance by some metals when cooled within a few degrees of absolute zero. The theory developed in 1957 by Bardeen, Schrieffer, and Cooper states that superconductivity arises when electrons travelling through a metal interact with the vibrating atoms of the metal.