(1937–    ), American physicist and Nobel laureate, notable for his contribution to the discovery of SUPERFLUIDITY, (q.v.) in helium-3, an isotope of HELIUM (q.v.).

Born in Washington, D.C., he was educated at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University and Duke University in Durham, N.C., earning his Ph.D. there in 1966. He joined the faculty at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., in 1967, becoming a professor in 1975 and director of the university’s Laboratory of Atomic and Solid-State Physics in 1990.

Richardson’s main research was in the physics of low temperatures (see CRYOGENICS,). He worked in the early 1970s with a colleague, the American physicist David M. Lee, and a graduate student, Douglas D. Osheroff, on the thermal and magnetic properties of helium-3 under low temperatures. In a special cooling apparatus that Lee and Richardson built for their research, they were able to produce temperatures close to ABSOLUTE ZERO, (q.v.). They found that only when cooled to a temperature of about two thousandths of a degree above absolute zero did helium-3 become superfluid. They were able to demonstrate its superfluidity, namely, the lack of inner friction, or flow resistance (see VISCOSITY,), and its unexpected magnetic properties and resemblances to superconductors (see SUPERCONDUCTIVITY,). Their discovery had implications for advances in quantum mechanics (see QUANTUM THEORY,) and elementary particle physics, or high-energy physics (see ELEMENTARY PARTICLES,).

In 1996, Richardson shared the Nobel Prize for physics with Lee and Osheroff, as co-discoverers of helium-3 superfluidity, for work that made a “most valuable contribution to our current view of the manifestations of quantum effects in bulk matter.”

See also DEVELOPMENTS IN PHYSICS SINCE 1930.