Schrieffer was born inOak Park, Illinois, the son of Louise (Anderson) and John Henry Schrieffer.[2] His family moved in 1940 toManhasset, New York, and then in 1947 toEustis, Florida, where his father, a former pharmaceutical salesman, began a career in the citrus industry. In his Florida days, Schrieffer enjoyed playing with homemade rockets and ham radio, a hobby that sparked an interest in electrical engineering.
After graduating fromEustis High School in 1949, Schrieffer was admitted to theMassachusetts Institute of Technology, where for two years he majored in electrical engineering before switching to physics in his junior year. He completed a bachelor's thesis on multiplets in heavy atoms under the direction ofJohn C. Slater in 1953. Pursuing an interest in solid-state physics, Schrieffer began graduate studies at theUniversity of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, where he was hired immediately as a research assistant to Bardeen. After working out a theoretical problem of electrical conduction on semiconductor surfaces, Schrieffer spent a year in the laboratory, applying the theory to several surface problems. In his third year of graduate studies, he joined Bardeen and Cooper in developing the theory of superconductivity.
Schrieffer recalled that in January 1957 he was on a subway in New York City when he had an idea of how to describe mathematically the ground state of superconducting electrons. Schrieffer and Bardeen's collaborator Cooper had discovered that electrons in a superconductor are grouped in pairs, now calledCooper pairs, and that the motions of all Cooper pairs within a single superconductor are correlated and function as a single entity due to phonon-electron interactions. Schrieffer's mathematical breakthrough was to describe the behavior of all Cooper pairs at the same time, instead of each individual pair. The day after returning to Illinois, Schrieffer showed his equations to Bardeen, who immediately realized they were the solution to the problem. The BCS theory (Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer) of superconductivity, as it is now known, accounted for more than 30 years of experimental results that had stymied some of the greatest theorists in physics.
On September 24, 2004, while driving with a suspendedlicense, Schrieffer was involved in an automobile accident that killed one person and injured seven others.[1]Schrieffer was said to have fallen asleep at the wheel of his car. On November 6, 2005, he was sentenced to two years inprison forvehicular manslaughter. Schrieffer was incarcerated inRichard J. Donovan Correctional Facility at Rock Mountain nearSan Diego, California.[7]
He died in late July 2019 at a nursing facility in Florida while sleeping. He was 88 years old.[1]
^"John Schrieffer".MyHeritage. RetrievedAugust 4, 2019.John, Robert Schrieffer was born on month day 1931, at birth place, Illinois, to John, H. Schrieffer and Louise Schrieffer.
