The Nobel Prize in Physics 1913
Awarded on: 1913-11-11
"for his investigations on the properties of matter at low temperatures which led, inter alia, to the production of liquid helium"
Affiliations:
- Leiden University – Leiden, the Netherlands
Heike Kamerlingh Onnes
Born: 1853-09-21 in Groningen, the Netherlands
Gender: male
Field: Dutch physicist (1853–1926)
Biography
Heike Kamerlingh Onnes was a Dutch physicist. After studying in Groningen and Heidelberg, he became professor of experimental physics at the University of Leiden where he taught from 1882 to 1923. In 1904, he established a cryogenics laboratory where he exploited the Hampson–Linde cycle to investigate how materials behave when cooled to nearly absolute zero. In 1908, he became the first to liquefy helium, cooling it to near 1.5 Kelvin, at the time the coldest temperature achieved on earth. For this research, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1913. Using liquid helium to investigate the electrical conductivity of solid mercury, he found in 1911 that at 4.2 K its electrical resistance vanishes, thus discovering superconductivity.