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American physicist Leon Cooper won the Nobel Prize in physics in 1972. Cooper developed a theory of why some metals can be superconductive.
Leon N. Cooper, born in 1930, American physicist, professor, and Nobel Prize winner. Cooper contributed significantly to the development of a theory of superconductivity by discovering what are now called “Cooper pairs”—that is, two electrons that, when situated a certain way among positive ions, no longer repel each other but instead develop an attraction for each other. These pairs then accumulate and move in the same direction; the result is a superconducting metal because there is no resistance to the flow of electricity through the metal. For his work in superconductivity, Cooper shared the 1972 Nobel Prize in physics with fellow American scientists John Bardeen and J. Robert Schrieffer.
Cooper was born in New York City. As a high school senior, he entered the Westinghouse Science Talent Search competition with a research project that analyzed how certain bacteria can become penicillin resistant. For his efforts, he was selected as one of 40 national winners. In 1954 Cooper received a Ph.D. degree in physics from Columbia University. His dissertation was supervised by American physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, who had directed the development of the atomic bomb.
In 1955 Cooper was working on quantum field theory at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, when John Bardeen, a scientist at the University of Illinois, invited Cooper to study superconductivity with him. First discovered in 1911, superconductivity is a phenomenon in which certain metals, when cooled to a temperature that is near absolute zero, no longer resist a flow of electricity running through them. The resulting free flow of electrons in the metal results in increased conductivity—an important discovery, particularly for the electronics industry. Electrical devices can waste large amounts of energy simply in trying to overcome electrical resistance, a problem that could be virtually eliminated if superconducting materials were used instead.
But for years after the discovery of superconductivity, scientists encountered difficulty when trying to apply the phenomenon in practical ways because of the extremely low temperature to which the metals must be cooled in order to overcome the electrical resistance. From 1955 to 1957 Bardeen, Cooper, and another physicist, J. Robert Schrieffer, developed what would later become known as the BCS theory of superconductivity, which explains why certain materials can be superconductive.
In 1957 Cooper left the University of Illinois to become an assistant professor of physics at Ohio State University. Since 1958 he has taught physics at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. Cooper holds honorary degrees from several United States universities and has received many awards for his work. In recent years, he has devoted his efforts toward a better understanding of memory and other brain functions.