Magnet Academy: John Robert Schrieffer

While still in graduate school, John Robert Schrieffer developed with John Bardeen and Leon Cooper a theoretical explanation of superconductivity that garnered the trio the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1972. The BCS theory (the acronym formed from the first letters of its creators' surnames) applies specifically to low temperature superconductors. Schrieffer, however, has also been involved in research focusing on developing an equally successful theory of high temperature superconductivity.