John Bardeen (May 23, 1908 – January 30, 1991) was an American physicist. He is the only person to win the Nobel Prize in Physics twice. He first won in 1956 with William Shockley and Walter Brattain for creating the transistor. He won again in 1972 with Leon Cooper and John Robert Schrieffer for developing a theory that explains superconductivity, called the BCS theory.

Bardeen was born and raised in Wisconsin. He earned his bachelor's and master's degrees in electrical engineering from the University of Wisconsin. Later, he received a Ph.D. in physics from Princeton University. After working during World War II, he became a researcher at Bell Labs and a professor at the University of Illinois.

The transistor changed the electronics industry, making it possible to create modern devices like telephones and computers. It also helped start the Information Age. Bardeen’s work on superconductivity, which earned him his second Nobel Prize, is used in nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy (NMR), medical magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), and superconducting quantum circuits.

Bardeen is the first of only three people to win multiple Nobel Prizes in the same category (the others are Frederick Sanger and Karl Barry Sharpless in chemistry). He is also one of five people who have won two Nobel Prizes. In 1990, Bardeen was listed on Life magazine’s "100 Most Influential Americans of the Century."

Education

John Bardeen was born on May 23, 1908, in Madison, Wisconsin. His parents were Charles Russell Bardeen, the first dean of the University of Wisconsin Medical School, and Althea Harmer.

Bardeen attended University of Wisconsin High School in Madison and graduated in 1923 at age 15. His graduation was delayed because he took courses at another high school and because of his mother’s death. In 1923, he entered the University of Wisconsin. While in college, he joined the Zeta Psi fraternity. To help pay membership fees, he played billiards. He was accepted into Tau Beta Pi, an engineering honor society. Bardeen chose engineering as his career path, even though his father was an academic. He believed engineering would offer good job opportunities.

In 1928, Bardeen earned a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Wisconsin. He took a year off to work in Chicago but still graduated in 1928. During his studies, he completed all graduate-level physics and mathematics courses in five years instead of the usual four. This allowed him time to finish his master’s thesis, which was supervised by Leo J. Peters. He received his M.S. in Electrical Engineering from Wisconsin in 1929.

Bardeen continued his studies at the University of Wisconsin but later joined Gulf Research Laboratories, the research division of Gulf Oil Corporation in Pittsburgh. From 1930 to 1933, he worked there on methods to interpret magnetic and gravitational surveys as a geophysicist. When the work no longer interested him, he applied to Princeton University’s graduate program in mathematics.

At Princeton, Bardeen studied mathematics and physics. Under physicist Eugene Wigner, he wrote his thesis on a problem in solid-state physics. Before finishing his thesis, he was offered a position as a junior fellow at Harvard University’s Society of Fellows in 1935. He worked there from 1935 to 1938, studying with future Nobel laureates John Hasbrouck van Vleck and Percy Williams Bridgman on topics like metal cohesion and electrical conduction. He also researched nuclear level density. Bardeen earned his Ph.D. in Mathematical Physics from Princeton in 1936.

Career

From 1938 to 1941, Bardeen worked as an assistant professor in the physics department at the University of Minnesota. From 1941 to 1944, he led a team at the Naval Ordnance Laboratory that studied magnetic mines, torpedoes, and ways to detect or disable them. During this time, his wife, Jane, gave birth to a son named Bill in 1941 and a daughter named Betsy in 1944.

In October 1945, Bardeen began working at Bell Telephone Laboratories as part of a group focused on solid-state physics. The group was led by William Shockley and chemist Stanley Morgan. Other members included Walter Brattain, physicist Gerald Pearson, chemist Robert Gibney, electronics expert Hilbert Moore, and several technicians. Bardeen moved his family to Summit, New Jersey.

The group’s goal was to find a solid-state replacement for fragile glass vacuum tube amplifiers. Their early experiments were based on Shockley’s ideas about using an electrical field to change the conductivity of a semiconductor. These experiments failed repeatedly, no matter the materials or setups. The team was stuck until Bardeen proposed a theory about surface states that blocked the electrical field from reaching the semiconductor. The group then focused on studying these surface states, meeting almost every day to discuss their work. Ideas were shared freely, and the team worked well together. By winter 1946, Bardeen had written a paper on surface states for the journal Physical Review. Brattain began experiments by shining light on the semiconductor’s surface to study the surface states, leading to more papers, including one co-authored with Shockley. These studies showed that surface states were likely responsible for their earlier failures. The team’s progress improved when they used electrolytes to surround the points where the semiconductor met conducting wires. Moore built a circuit to control the frequency of input signals and suggested using glycol borate (gu), a thick chemical that did not evaporate. Finally, Pearson applied a voltage to a droplet of gu placed across a p–n junction, leading to evidence of power amplification.

By 1951, Bardeen was seeking a new job. A friend, Fred Seitz, helped convince the University of Illinois to offer Bardeen a position paying $10,000 a year. Bardeen accepted and joined the engineering and physics departments at Illinois in 1951, where he became a professor of electrical engineering and physics.

At Illinois, Bardeen started two major research programs: one in the electrical engineering department focused on both experimental and theoretical studies of semiconductors, and one in the physics department focused on theoretical studies of large-scale quantum systems, including superconductivity and quantum liquids.

Bardeen worked at Illinois from 1951 to 1975 and then became a professor emeritus. In his later years, he continued research on how electrons move through charge density waves (CDWs) in metallic chain compounds. His idea that CDW electron transport is a collective quantum phenomenon was initially doubted. However, experiments in 2012 showed patterns in CDW currents similar to those in superconducting devices, supporting the idea that CDW transport is quantum in nature. Bardeen continued his research into the 1980s, publishing articles in Physical Review Letters and Physics Today less than a year before his death.

A collection of Bardeen’s personal papers is kept at the University of Illinois Archives.

Research

On December 23, 1947, Bardeen and Walter Brattain were working without William Shockley when they successfully created a point-contact transistor that could amplify electrical signals. By the following month, Bell Labs' patent lawyers began preparing patent applications for the invention.

Bell Labs' lawyers later found that Shockley's idea for a field effect transistor had been described and patented earlier by Julius Lilienfeld in 1930. Lilienfeld had filed a patent similar to a type of transistor called an MESFET in Canada on October 22, 1925.

Shockley publicly claimed most of the credit for inventing the transistor, which caused Bardeen to feel uncomfortable about working with him. Bell Labs management, however, always presented all three men as a team. Over time, Shockley's behavior made Bardeen and Brattain feel unwelcome, and he stopped them from working on the junction transistor. Bardeen later focused on studying superconductivity and left Bell Labs in 1951. Brattain refused to work with Shockley and was assigned to a different group. Neither Bardeen nor Brattain played a major role in the transistor's development after its first year.

The word "transistor" combines parts of "transconductance" and "resistor." It was much smaller than the vacuum tubes it replaced in radios and televisions, used much less power, was more reliable, and helped make electrical devices smaller and more efficient.

In 1956, Bardeen, Brattain, and Shockley were jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for their work on semiconductors and the discovery of the transistor effect.

In 1957, Bardeen, along with Leon Cooper and John Robert Schrieffer, proposed the standard theory of superconductivity, known as the BCS theory.

In 1972, Bardeen, Cooper, and Schrieffer were jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for their work on the BCS theory. This was Bardeen's second Nobel Prize in Physics, making him the first person to win two Nobel Prizes in the same field.

In the late 1960s, Bardeen believed that Cooper and Schrieffer deserved recognition for the BCS theory. He worried that the Nobel Committee might avoid awarding him again, as he was a co-author. To help ensure the BCS theory was recognized, Bardeen nominated scientists who studied superconducting tunneling effects, such as the Josephson effect, for the Nobel Prize in 1967. He believed that highlighting tunneling research, which relied on superconductivity, would increase the chances of the BCS theory being honored. He also noted that the Nobel Committee preferred international teams, which was true for his nominees. Bardeen repeated these nominations in 1971, 1972, and 1973.

Bardeen became interested in superconducting tunneling in 1960 after working with the General Electric Research Laboratory in Schenectady, New York. There, he learned about experiments by Ivar Giaever at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, which showed that electrons from normal materials could move into superconducting materials.

On June 8, 1962, Brian Josephson, who was 23 years old at the time, submitted a paper predicting a current of electricity flowing across a barrier, later called the Josephson effect. Bardeen challenged Josephson's theory in a note published in a scientific journal ten days later.

The debate continued at the 8th International Conference on Low Temperature Physics in London in September 1962. During Josephson's presentation, Bardeen raised objections. After a long discussion, neither man reached agreement. Josephson repeatedly asked Bardeen, "Did you calculate it? No? I did."

In 1963, experiments and new theories supported Josephson's predictions, including a paper by Philip W. Anderson and John Rowell from Bell Labs. After this, Bardeen accepted Josephson's theory and publicly admitted he had been wrong. He invited Josephson to work as a postdoctoral researcher in Illinois during the 1965–1966 academic year and later nominated Josephson and Giaever for the Nobel Prize. Both scientists received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1973.

Personal life

While studying at Princeton, John Bardeen met Jane Maxwell (1907–1997) during a visit to his old friends in Pittsburgh. He married Jane on July 18, 1938.

Bardeen was a scientist with a quiet and humble personality. While he worked as a professor for nearly 40 years at the University of Illinois, neighbors remembered him for hosting cookouts where he prepared food for his friends. Many of his guests did not know about his work at the university. He often asked his guests if they liked their hamburger buns toasted, as he preferred them that way. He enjoyed playing golf and going on picnics with his family. Lillian Hoddeson noted that Bardeen did not fit the common image of a "genius" and did not want to seem special. Because of this, the public and media often overlooked his achievements.

During a 1988 interview, Bardeen said, "I am not a religious person, and so do not think about it very much." However, he also stated, "I feel that science cannot provide an answer to the ultimate questions about the meaning and purpose of life." Bardeen believed in a code of moral values and behavior. His wife took their children to church, where she taught Sunday school and served as a church elder. Despite this, Bardeen and his wife did not believe in an afterlife or other religious ideas. He had three children: James M. Bardeen, William A. Bardeen, and Elizabeth.

Bardeen died of heart disease on January 30, 1991, at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts, at the age of 82. Although he lived in Champaign-Urbana, he traveled to Boston for medical care. Bardeen and his wife, Jane, are buried at Forest Hill Cemetery in Madison, Wisconsin.

Recognition

Bardeen is the only person to have won the Physics prize twice. He is also one of three people who have won the same prize twice; the others are Frederick Sanger, who won the Chemistry prize in 1958 and 1980, and Karl Barry Sharpless, who won the Chemistry prize in 2001 and 2022.

Commemoration

At the end of this decade, when people start listing the names of individuals who had the greatest impact on the 20th century, John Bardeen, who passed away last week, should be near the top of the list. Mr. Bardeen received two Nobel Prizes and was given many other honors. However, one of the greatest honors is seeing the ways his work has improved lives, making them longer, healthier, and better.

To honor John Bardeen, the engineering area at the University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign is named Bardeen Quad.

In addition, Sony Corporation created a $3 million John Bardeen professorial chair at the University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign in 1990. Sony became successful by using Bardeen’s transistors in portable TVs and radios. Sony also worked with researchers at Illinois. As of 2022, the John Bardeen Professor is Yurii Vlasov.

At the time of Bardeen’s death, Morton Weir, then-University of Illinois chancellor, said, "It is rare for someone’s work to change the lives of every American; John’s did."

John Bardeen was honored on a United States postage stamp released on March 6, 2008, as part of the "American Scientists" series designed by artist Victor Stabin. The $0.41 stamp was introduced during a ceremony at the University of Illinois. The stamp’s description states: "Theoretical physicist John Bardeen (1908–1991) shared the Nobel Prize in Physics twice—in 1956, as co-inventor of the transistor, and in 1972, for explaining superconductivity. The transistor made modern electronics, such as computers and microchips, possible. Superconductivity has many uses, including infrared sensors and medical imaging systems." Other scientists featured on the "American Scientists" stamp include biochemist Gerty Cori, chemist Linus Pauling, and astronomer Edwin Hubble.