David Lee

Origins and early life

David Morris Lee was born on 20 January 1931 in Rye, a small town just outside New York City, where his father, an electrical engineer, commuted to a growing company he would one day run, and his mother taught in an elementary school. Both his parents, born and raised in New York City, were the children of Jewish immigrants who had come to the United States from England and Lithuania in the late nineteenth century. He graduated from Harvard in 1952, served twenty-two months in the army during the last stages of the Korean War, took a master's degree at the University of Connecticut and in 1955 entered Yale, where Henry Fairbank set him to work on liquid helium-3.

Work and career

In January 1959 he joined Cornell University to set up its low-temperature laboratory, and soon afterwards met his wife Dana, a doctoral student in nutrition and biochemistry born and raised in Thailand. There, with his colleague Robert Richardson and their graduate student Douglas Osheroff, he cooled helium-3 to within a few thousandths of a degree of absolute zero, and late in 1971 they saw small, unexpected jumps in its pressure curve.

A first paper in 1972 read them as a change in frozen helium-3, but a second that same year showed two phase transitions in the liquid itself: about two thousandths of a degree above absolute zero, helium-3 becomes a superfluid that flows without friction.

Recognition

The discovery set off intensive research on this new quantum liquid and brought the three men the Simon Memorial Prize in 1976 and the Oliver Buckley Prize in 1981. In 1996 he shared the Nobel Prize in Physics with Osheroff and Richardson, a third each, for their discovery of superfluidity in helium-3. After half a century at Cornell, he took a half-time professorship at Texas A&M University in November 2009 and was named a distinguished professor of physics and astronomy there in 2012.