Bardeen Honored With Postage Stamp

Laura Peters, Lead Technical Editor -- Semiconductor International, 3/7/2008 3:20:00 PM

A United States postage stamp commemorating the achievements of two-time Nobel Prize-winner John Bardeen was revealed at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana on Thursday.

Bardeen, a faculty member at the University of Illinois for 40 years, was the first person to win two Nobel Prizes in the same field. In 1956, Bardeen, William Shockley and Walter Brattain were awarded the Nobel Prize in physics for work on the first transistor. In 1972, Bardeen was awarded the Nobel Prize in physics for his theory of superconductivity, together with Leon Cooper and Robert Schrieffer.

Physicist John Bardeen was honored with a U.S. postage stamp.

Nick Holonyak Jr., the John Bardeen Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Physics at the University, referred to Bardeen as one of the greatest scientists of the 20th century. Holonyak, a pioneer in his own right, invented the first practical light-emitting diode (LED) and is currently developing transistor lasers. Holonyak, Bardeen’s first graduate student, still performs research at the university’s Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

"Bardeen was arguably the greatest master ever of the quantum theory of the conductivity of solids, which is at the core, the very heart of all of electronics," Holonyak said in a statement. "Legendary names in physics failed for almost 50 years in explaining the mystery of superconductivity until the successful Bardeen attack on the problem, which also introduced revolutionary particle-pairing notions into all of physics.

"Perhaps more vital to everyone on the planet is the transistor and all it has spawned," Holonyak said. "No one sought so little for himself, gave so much and was so generous and considerate of his fellow man."

In the spring of 1947 at Bell Labs, William Shockley gave Brattain and Bardeen the task of explaining why an amplifier he had devised didn't work. At the heart of the amplifier was a crystal of silicon (later changed to germanium). It was Bardeen who suggested that they were falsely assuming that electrical current traveled through all parts of the germanium in a similar way, and that electrons might behave differently at the metal’s surface. If they could control what was happening at the surface, the amplifier should work. In the course of several experiments over a period now known as the “magic month,” on Dec. 23, 1947, Bardeen, Brattain and Shockley succeeded in creating a point-contact transistor that achieved amplification.

In 1957, Bardeen, Cooper and Schrieffer proposed the standard theory of superconductivity known as the BCS theory (named for their initials). BCS theory views superconductivity as a macroscopic quantum mechanical effect. It proposes that electrons with opposite spin can become paired. Independently and at the same time, the superconductivity phenomenon was explained by Nikolay Bogoliubov by means of the so-called Bogoliubov transformations.

For more on the life and career of John Bardeen (1908-1991), see "True Genius: The Life and Science of John Bardeen,” a book review by Howard Huff.